“A luxuriant fevered quest for reclamation…Political, poetical, and spooky good.” —Joy Williams “A love story of the most fevered, brutal order…Propulsive, erotic, and darkly dreamlike.” —VultureA new novel by PEN/Faulkner Award winner Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, “written with the intensity of early Marguerite Duras and Ferrante’s Days of Abandonment,” about a young woman caught in an … Abandonment,” about a young woman caught in an affair with a much older man, a personal and political exploration of desire, power, and human connection (The Millions).
It’s summer when Arezu, an Iranian American teenager, goes to Spain to meet her estranged father at an apartment he owns there. He never shows up, instead sending her a weekly allowance, care of his step-nephew, Omar, a forty-year-old Lebanese man. As the weeks progress, Arezu is drawn into a mercurial, charged, and ultimately catastrophic affair with Omar, a relationship that shatters her just at the cusp of adulthood.
Two decades later, Arezu inherits the apartment. She returns with her best friend, Ellie, an Israeli-American scholar devoted to the Palestinian cause, to excavate the place and finally put to words a trauma she’s long held in silence. Together, she and Ellie catalog the questions of agency, sexuality, displacement, and erasure that surface as Arezu confronts the ghosts of that summer, crafting between them a story that spans continents and centuries.
Equal parts Marguerite Duras and Shirley Jackson, Rachel Cusk and Samanta Schweblin, Savage Tongues is a compulsive, unsettling, and bravely observed exploration of violence and eroticism, haunting and healing, and the profound intimacy born of the deepest pain.
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“A golden tunnel of light shining from a heaving pit of darkness”….
…That’s just what this raw, open wound of a book is. This novel is primarily an internal monologue of our protagonist, Arezu, as she travels to Spain to confront the ghost of her past, the ghost which has thus far defined the shape of her. This book is not an easy read. It’s profoundly sad and there’s work involved in turning the page. Van der Vliet Oloomi does an exceptional job here. There is very little critique of the writing, other than what I consider to be a slight overuse of some flowery words such as “limpid” and ‘”susurrus.” Otherwise, this book is extremely well written and she puts the reader right in Arezu’s head, into the turmoil and conflict and pain. Arezu is a woman that has never felt whole. She has suffered a childhood with an absentee father, been moved around the world by her mother, and reaped the pain of being of mixed race in a world that seeks to label everything. As a teen on the cusp of womanhood, running from the realities of being a Muslim in America, she finds herself in Spain seeking wholeness in a predator. For years she tries to reconcile the concept of rape with her memories of love and connection. Finally, she returns to Spain to face the ghosts head on and this book takes us with her. This is a stark and often painful look into the mind of a woman dealing with the trauma of a sexual assault by someone she thought she could trust after twenty years had passed. It’s only at the very end of this book that we see a hint of that golden ray of light shining on her ocean of pain. Very well done, if you’re brave enough to take the journey.
Thank you to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.
Thank you to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for this ARC in exchange for an honest review!
Savage Tongues by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi is a lovely relationship drama set in Spain about an Iranian-American teenager’s relationship with an older man and what happens 20 years later when she returns to the apartment she stayed in. The teenager, Arezu, moves to Spain to live with her father, but instead, he leaves her in the care/guardianship of Omar, an adult man who her father trusts. Arezu ends up spending a lot of time with him, and their relationship develops from there. The prose is beautiful and easy to read. I’m sure this will be a nice summer novel for many readers.
Here is a quote from Chapter 1 when Arezu is speaking about Omar:
““You,” he said to me weeks later, said to me habitually then,
his head tilted back, his throat exposed, “are my lover.” He would
draw me in and kiss me hungrily. I didn’t always like it, perhaps
wasn’t even comfortable, but I let him. Maybe I even egged him
on. I don’t know. I’ll never know. I was in acute pain, lonely in
ways I was too young to grasp, and there was no one around to
ask me to articulate my suffering, to help me fix it in language,
so I raged on like a wounded animal who knows not what to do
except soothe her pain with more pain, lust after the final blow
of death that will put an end to it all. I became hooked on Omar.
He was like a drug, a humiliation I craved, and I kept going back
for more.”
Overall, Savage Tongues reads like literary fiction that would also be a pleasant beach read for readers looking for a tale of romance set in Spain. For me, personally, I just couldn’t get over the creepy age-gap in the relationship between Arezu and Omar, so that is why I took off 2 stars. This is also just not the type of book that I typically read. I don’t usually enjoy literary fiction, realistic novels, historical fiction, relationship dramas, or romances. That’s not the book’s fault though. I’m just explaining why it wasn’t a 5-star read for me. If you are intrigued by the excerpt above, or if you’re a fan of beach reads set in a foreign country, I highly recommend that you check out this book when it comes out in August!