Savage Tongues: A Novel

By Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi

“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." —Vulture

A 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’s search for healing in the fall-out of an affair with a much older man, a personal and political exploration of desire, power, domination, 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 Clarice Lispector, Savage Tongues is a compulsive, unsettling, and bravely observed exploration of violence and eroticism, haunting and healing, the profound intimacy born of the deepest pain, and the life-long search for healing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Aug 3, 2021
• ISBN: 9780358316602

Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi

AZAREEN VAN DER VLIET OLOOMI is the author of the novels Savage Tongues, Call Me Zebra, and Fra Keeler and the director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Notre Dame. She is a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” honoree and the winner of a 2019 PEN/Faulkner Award, a John Gardner Award, and a 2015 Whiting Award, as well as the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship and residency fellowships from MacDowell and Ledig House. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Paris Review, Guernica, Granta, Bomb, and elsewhere. She lives in Chicago and is the founder of Literatures of Annihilation, Exile and Resistance, a lecture series on the global Middle East that focuses on literature shaped by colonialism, military domination, and state-sanctioned violence.  

Reviews for Savage Tongues

[muddyboy · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

If you enjoy dialogue you will hate this book. If you like long paragraphs of personal introspection you will love this book. The primary character is a married woman (seemingly happy) who is haunted by a relationship she has twenty years before with a older man. She travels to Spain with a friend to the "scene of the crime". to see if the man is still there or if not sort through her feelings about the past.. Was it love or rape? Did he care for her or was he just using her? Frankly, I would love to give her a shake and scream GET OVER IT! Much ado about nothing.

[khenkins-687878 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Pen/Faulkner Award winner for Call Me Zebra, Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi has written another novel equally deserving of accolades. It is an all-consuming, exhausting narrative, following the thoughts of an Iranian-American woman as she returns, after twenty years, to Spain hoping for an exorcism of the confounding memories of a cruel love affair with a much older man. A parallel storyline describes the oppression and its consequences of one culture on another.Savage Tongues, a better title than the earlier proposed Arezu (the main character's name), keens and seethes with angst as Arezu meets again the landscapes of her oppression/obsession. Beginning with a rape, the affair continued, shaped by Arezu's teenage passion, manipulated by her lover's use of that passion. Arezu's scars run deep; she visits and revisits her time in Marbella, engulfed by a complex of shame, anger, agitation, outrage, and fascination. She was seduced, and the allurement of that seduction is evident along with and in spite of the memories of her lover's brutal possessiveness and invidious objectification. (The comparison to Eastern and Western cultures is clear.)Her scars do run deep, and her memories and thoughts take the reader, as well, deep into a maelstrom of emotions, circling and re-circling the events of those months so many years ago that have never been forgotten. Arezu has a woman friend along with her on this journey to the places in Marbella that have resonated through her life, and a loving and understanding husband in the States. Ultimately Arezu, and the reader, swirl higher and higher to escape (at last!) into an acceptance of human frailty and the contradictory facets of the human condition.Thanks to Houghton Mifflin and Bookishfirst for an ARC of this book. This is an honest review.