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Savage Tongues: A Haunting Coming of Age Story – Literary Women's Fiction about Trauma and Healing
A new novel by PEN/Faulkner Award winner Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi—“if you don’t know this name yet, you should” (Entertainment Weekly)—about a young woman caught in an affair with a much older man, a personal and political exploration of desire, power, and human connection.
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.
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.
304 pages, Paperback
First published August 3, 2021
33 people are currently reading
1599 people want to read
About the author
Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi
9 books131 followersAwards: PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, Whiting Awards, 5 Under 35
Education: Brown University, University of California San Diego
Nominations: PEN/Open Book, Emerging Author
Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi is an award-winning Iranian-American author. Her 2018 novel Call Me Zebra (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018) is the winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the John Gardner Award for Fiction, and was long-listed for the PEN Open Book Award.
Oloomi is also the author of Fra Keeler (Dorothy, a publishing project). She is the winner of a 2015 Whiting Writers' Award, a National Book Foundation "5 Under 35" honoree, the recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship, and a Fulbright Fellowship in Fiction to Catalonia, Spain. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, GRANTA, Guernica, BOMB, and the Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal, among other places. She has lived in Iran, Spain, Italy, the United Arab Emirates, and currently teaches in the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing at the University of Notre Dame. Call Me Zebra is being translated into half a dozen languages and Fra Keeler was published in Italian by Giulio Perrone Editore in 2015. She attended Brown University and the University of California San Diego, and now lives in the Chicago area.
Education: Brown University, University of California San Diego
Nominations: PEN/Open Book, Emerging Author
Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi is an award-winning Iranian-American author. Her 2018 novel Call Me Zebra (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018) is the winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the John Gardner Award for Fiction, and was long-listed for the PEN Open Book Award.
Oloomi is also the author of Fra Keeler (Dorothy, a publishing project). She is the winner of a 2015 Whiting Writers' Award, a National Book Foundation "5 Under 35" honoree, the recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship, and a Fulbright Fellowship in Fiction to Catalonia, Spain. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, GRANTA, Guernica, BOMB, and the Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal, among other places. She has lived in Iran, Spain, Italy, the United Arab Emirates, and currently teaches in the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing at the University of Notre Dame. Call Me Zebra is being translated into half a dozen languages and Fra Keeler was published in Italian by Giulio Perrone Editore in 2015. She attended Brown University and the University of California San Diego, and now lives in the Chicago area.
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Displaying 1 - 20 of 110 reviews
February 28, 2021
At one point, I convinced myself that I was reading a parody. This book had to be a parody of a over-educated young woman who could only process her emotions by filtering them through the sterilized, feminist lens of a neurotic PhD student.
Unfortunately, that was not the case. We have a classic trope of an older, charismatic man who seduces a young, precocious lady, the relationship inevitably turning abusive. Which is fine! Tropes are cool! We can play with them in new ways! However, she takes this standard trope and keeps it static, analyzing it over and over although the reader has no emotional connection or investment in the relationship. The actual seduction scene, which the first 1/3 of the book hinges on, is laughably bad.
What we are left with is an intellectual framing and the author hanging ornaments on the framing, glittery adjectives and phosphorescent sensory details. Not a story. Not characters. Not plot.
Listen to full reviews at: https://bookclubbed.buzzsprout.com/
Unfortunately, that was not the case. We have a classic trope of an older, charismatic man who seduces a young, precocious lady, the relationship inevitably turning abusive. Which is fine! Tropes are cool! We can play with them in new ways! However, she takes this standard trope and keeps it static, analyzing it over and over although the reader has no emotional connection or investment in the relationship. The actual seduction scene, which the first 1/3 of the book hinges on, is laughably bad.
What we are left with is an intellectual framing and the author hanging ornaments on the framing, glittery adjectives and phosphorescent sensory details. Not a story. Not characters. Not plot.
Listen to full reviews at: https://bookclubbed.buzzsprout.com/
March 20, 2021
Although this book started strong, its repetitiveness and unrelenting deep dive into the 20 year old trauma of a speculative sexual awakening began to take its toll. What I did find more intriguing was the relationship between Arezu an American of Iranian heritage and Ellie, her best friend, who had been raised an Orthodox Jew but was an activist for displaced Palestinians in her native Israel. So much of this read like autofiction, but my biggest takeaway was to be sure to get tickets in advance if I should ever find myself in Grenada and wanted to visit the Alhambra.
January 11, 2021
Arezu returns to Spain after 20 years to her father's apartment which she has now inherited. When she was 17 she spent a summer there seeing no one but a 40 year old distant relative. Her experiences during that summer still haunt her and return more vividly when she steps into the musty, dusty apartment with her best friend.
Arezu is half American and half Iranian. Her friend is half American and half Israeli and is a support of Palestinian causes. Both women have both shared many experiences and individual experiences of love, loss and trauma.
The book has three themes. The first is of the trauma of love gone wrong, of being a victim of predatorily older man. The second is living in the West as a women from the Middle East and seeing what is wrong in both worlds. The last is the beauty of friendship.
To me the last theme worked best, the second theme needed it's own book and the first was a bit laboured. Overall though it was an impressive book.
Arezu is half American and half Iranian. Her friend is half American and half Israeli and is a support of Palestinian causes. Both women have both shared many experiences and individual experiences of love, loss and trauma.
The book has three themes. The first is of the trauma of love gone wrong, of being a victim of predatorily older man. The second is living in the West as a women from the Middle East and seeing what is wrong in both worlds. The last is the beauty of friendship.
To me the last theme worked best, the second theme needed it's own book and the first was a bit laboured. Overall though it was an impressive book.
August 1, 2021
The narrator of this book states, “in all of my years of writing I hadn’t once been able to produce an outline or a novel that was distinctly plot driven . . . . [with] events that administer exacting lessons to the characters, forcing them either to grow or become more calloused versions of who they already were.” Well, the author certainly “succeeded” in writing a book that has virtually no plot and no complex or dynamic characters.
Arezu, a 37-year-old Iranian-American, travels to Marbella, Spain, with her best friend Ellie, an Israeli-American queer woman. Arezu has inherited the apartment where she spent a summer when she was 17. She visits to confront the ghosts of that summer when Omar, a 40-year-old distantly related man, seduced her and kept her in an abusive relationship. Once ensconced in the apartment, the two women do nothing except eat, drink, clean the apartment, and go to the beach. The entire book is Arezu’s unrelenting examination of her trauma.
To say that the pace is glacial would be an understatement. I certainly would have abandoned the book had I not felt obligated to finish it in order to write a review since I’d received a galley from the publisher. Good-quality literary fiction is cerebral but it does not overanalyze everything repeatedly. Who sees swans and feels compelled to comment that “The swans, too, were a symbol of nationalism, a polite intimation of England’s timeless colonial agenda.” At least a dozen times Arezu looks in a mirror and each elicits a long description of what she sees or imagines she sees: “A vertiginous sensation took hold of me. There she was, that other future version of me – her features wounded and disfigured, her skin stretched, sagging, the light in her eyes spent, her mouth cracked open – staring back at me from the reflective surface of the mirror. I grew increasingly claustrophobic . . . I felt the walls leaning in.” This future self is repeatedly described with “her wounded eyes, gaunt cheeks, her brittle hair” and “bloodied and bloated face.”
The descriptions of scenery are over-wrought: “the thick papery bougainvillea that crawled across the city’s surfaces like mouths painted rouge, like kisses turned toward the vivid blue of the sky.” Light is described as “uncertain yellow” and “yolky, oxidized” and “bright, eager” and “brilliant, luminous, incandescent” and “silky golden” and “warm vinegary” and “mildewy yellow” and “shy mustard” and “mild yolky”! Why are two adjectives always necessary? The writer seems to latch on to words and then feels compelled to use them again and again. Susurrus is used three times. The phrase “I considered” appears 34 times!
Ellie’s presence serves little purpose. Her main task seems to be as a distraction. She certainly doesn’t say anything helpful. In fact, dialogue is limited. What dialogue is included is stiff and unnatural: “’This card signals conflict and change. The conflict you experienced is deep and continuous with an ongoing conflict that existed and still exists outside of you, a cultural conflict between East and West, earth and water, masculine and feminine, the psychic and the material – you were caught at their fault lines. . . . In order to resolve this conflict . . . you’ll have to draw on all of your psychic and emotional resources. The resolution may be subtle, the path toward its achievement equally so, composed of nearly imperceptible shifts in consciousness that ultimately will integrate all of the many differing opinions that you carry within you.’” No one speaks like this!
After this wooden conversation, Arezu continues that Ellie “added that true integration didn’t mean eliminating contradiction but rather aligning the inconsistencies inherent in my intellectual and physical life with the high ideals of the heavens, not the heaven we’ve constructed from our limited position on earth, from our religious perspectives, but a heaven beyond the paradise we’ve been taught to imagine, a space that is abundant, wide open, that allows opposing realities to exist side by side without judgment – a complex space where we are invited to let go of our constant need to know or understand everything, where we are no longer measured by our supposed purity.” Then Arezu starts to cry! This passage may well leave the reader in tears as s/he tries to decipher this inaccessible prose!
Arezu comes across as full of self-pity. She blames everyone and everything for her falling into the arms of an older predatory man: “I had been primed – through my culture, my family dynamics, my own unbending character – to fall prey to him.” She blames her negligent father, her own loneliness, and Omar’s background and experiences in Beirut during Lebanon’s civil war. She thinks that maybe “the house manipulated me into craving what had then seemed to be unparalleled bliss” and argues that “our affair was made possible by the beauty of the Andalusian landscape” and even “The city seduced us with the magic of familiarity, the anthem of belonging, the forgotten memories of our ancestors who had resisted and survived persecution through subterfuge.”
Her self-dramatizing grates and does not arouse sympathy when she makes statements like “I was in acute pain” and I’d “been subjected to a violence so severe and perseverant by the gears of history” and “all my life there had been a gun pointed at my back” and “My life required of me an almost inhumane level of cognitive flexibility” and “being exposed to so much grief in our youth had numbed us.” In her day-to day life, however, Arezu seems to be functioning well; she has a loving husband and a successful career, though she claims to live “in a state of skeptical inquiry, on guard, her ability to trust shattered by history, her sense of self ground to dust” with no “ability to compose my own identity” and with “parts of myself . . . amputated from memory” after having been “pushed . . . prematurely over the ravine into womanhood.” None of these consequences are really shown. At the risk of sounding insensitive, I wanted to scream, “Okay, move on. Stop wallowing. You’ve managed to achieve so much despite what happened to you. Fixating on what happened 20 years earlier only gives it more power.”
For me, this was just an exhausting read. The term novel is not appropriate for this book; it is an unrelenting examination of a trauma; after a while, it produces only a susurrus in which meaning is lost. The narrator’s reflections are repetitive and fruitless, inspiring no growth.
Note: I received an eARC from the publisher via NetGalley.
Please check out my reader's blog (https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/) and follow me on Twitter (@DCYakabuski).
Arezu, a 37-year-old Iranian-American, travels to Marbella, Spain, with her best friend Ellie, an Israeli-American queer woman. Arezu has inherited the apartment where she spent a summer when she was 17. She visits to confront the ghosts of that summer when Omar, a 40-year-old distantly related man, seduced her and kept her in an abusive relationship. Once ensconced in the apartment, the two women do nothing except eat, drink, clean the apartment, and go to the beach. The entire book is Arezu’s unrelenting examination of her trauma.
To say that the pace is glacial would be an understatement. I certainly would have abandoned the book had I not felt obligated to finish it in order to write a review since I’d received a galley from the publisher. Good-quality literary fiction is cerebral but it does not overanalyze everything repeatedly. Who sees swans and feels compelled to comment that “The swans, too, were a symbol of nationalism, a polite intimation of England’s timeless colonial agenda.” At least a dozen times Arezu looks in a mirror and each elicits a long description of what she sees or imagines she sees: “A vertiginous sensation took hold of me. There she was, that other future version of me – her features wounded and disfigured, her skin stretched, sagging, the light in her eyes spent, her mouth cracked open – staring back at me from the reflective surface of the mirror. I grew increasingly claustrophobic . . . I felt the walls leaning in.” This future self is repeatedly described with “her wounded eyes, gaunt cheeks, her brittle hair” and “bloodied and bloated face.”
The descriptions of scenery are over-wrought: “the thick papery bougainvillea that crawled across the city’s surfaces like mouths painted rouge, like kisses turned toward the vivid blue of the sky.” Light is described as “uncertain yellow” and “yolky, oxidized” and “bright, eager” and “brilliant, luminous, incandescent” and “silky golden” and “warm vinegary” and “mildewy yellow” and “shy mustard” and “mild yolky”! Why are two adjectives always necessary? The writer seems to latch on to words and then feels compelled to use them again and again. Susurrus is used three times. The phrase “I considered” appears 34 times!
Ellie’s presence serves little purpose. Her main task seems to be as a distraction. She certainly doesn’t say anything helpful. In fact, dialogue is limited. What dialogue is included is stiff and unnatural: “’This card signals conflict and change. The conflict you experienced is deep and continuous with an ongoing conflict that existed and still exists outside of you, a cultural conflict between East and West, earth and water, masculine and feminine, the psychic and the material – you were caught at their fault lines. . . . In order to resolve this conflict . . . you’ll have to draw on all of your psychic and emotional resources. The resolution may be subtle, the path toward its achievement equally so, composed of nearly imperceptible shifts in consciousness that ultimately will integrate all of the many differing opinions that you carry within you.’” No one speaks like this!
After this wooden conversation, Arezu continues that Ellie “added that true integration didn’t mean eliminating contradiction but rather aligning the inconsistencies inherent in my intellectual and physical life with the high ideals of the heavens, not the heaven we’ve constructed from our limited position on earth, from our religious perspectives, but a heaven beyond the paradise we’ve been taught to imagine, a space that is abundant, wide open, that allows opposing realities to exist side by side without judgment – a complex space where we are invited to let go of our constant need to know or understand everything, where we are no longer measured by our supposed purity.” Then Arezu starts to cry! This passage may well leave the reader in tears as s/he tries to decipher this inaccessible prose!
Arezu comes across as full of self-pity. She blames everyone and everything for her falling into the arms of an older predatory man: “I had been primed – through my culture, my family dynamics, my own unbending character – to fall prey to him.” She blames her negligent father, her own loneliness, and Omar’s background and experiences in Beirut during Lebanon’s civil war. She thinks that maybe “the house manipulated me into craving what had then seemed to be unparalleled bliss” and argues that “our affair was made possible by the beauty of the Andalusian landscape” and even “The city seduced us with the magic of familiarity, the anthem of belonging, the forgotten memories of our ancestors who had resisted and survived persecution through subterfuge.”
Her self-dramatizing grates and does not arouse sympathy when she makes statements like “I was in acute pain” and I’d “been subjected to a violence so severe and perseverant by the gears of history” and “all my life there had been a gun pointed at my back” and “My life required of me an almost inhumane level of cognitive flexibility” and “being exposed to so much grief in our youth had numbed us.” In her day-to day life, however, Arezu seems to be functioning well; she has a loving husband and a successful career, though she claims to live “in a state of skeptical inquiry, on guard, her ability to trust shattered by history, her sense of self ground to dust” with no “ability to compose my own identity” and with “parts of myself . . . amputated from memory” after having been “pushed . . . prematurely over the ravine into womanhood.” None of these consequences are really shown. At the risk of sounding insensitive, I wanted to scream, “Okay, move on. Stop wallowing. You’ve managed to achieve so much despite what happened to you. Fixating on what happened 20 years earlier only gives it more power.”
For me, this was just an exhausting read. The term novel is not appropriate for this book; it is an unrelenting examination of a trauma; after a while, it produces only a susurrus in which meaning is lost. The narrator’s reflections are repetitive and fruitless, inspiring no growth.
Note: I received an eARC from the publisher via NetGalley.
Please check out my reader's blog (https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/) and follow me on Twitter (@DCYakabuski).
June 7, 2022
This book is very emotionally and beautifully written. It’s written in first person and the style is of a woman’s inner rumination - it’s vulnerable and honest while also being beautiful prose. The book explores how the experiences we have define us with plenty of nuance and in sometimes complex and perhaps unexpected ways.
The story is built in three intertwined parts -
First, around a middle aged woman returning to an apartment which she inherited where she had lived as a 17-yr old, and had been groomed and then raped and then fell into a relationship with a much older man. This part is about her attempting to reckon with/reconcile herself with the trauma of this experience. The woman is now happily married and has a child, yet this trauma is given the largest portion of the book which I found to be an interesting and effective way to show how trauma lives within the brain, how it’s a complex thing, and how it can affect everything even after many years. Also interesting as due to the extreme obsession with the man (who clearly didn’t care much for her) I felt the story examined the ways in which young women’s brains are molded in a patriarchal society.
The second “part” is of exile, of being lost, and of being part of the diaspora. Along those lines it heavily explores how a place, a country, or a house can have such an overpowering effect on us. It made me think about all of the places I have lived and their different systems of control over me - which while obv completely different/ and I have not suffered in these same ways as in the book or as someone in the diaspora - she put into words some of these universal feelings which I found to be really amazing and beautifully written.
The last “part” of the story is about a very deep and supportive friendship between two women who bonded due to their complex pasts. This part was really lovely although the friendship seemed very one-sided in this particular story - the friendship was clearly a strong one, and Ellie (the friend) was a compelling character to which I wish more time was devoted to as I wanted to learn more about her.
Overall I thought this was a great read although it took me a bit of time to get through.
The story is built in three intertwined parts -
First, around a middle aged woman returning to an apartment which she inherited where she had lived as a 17-yr old, and had been groomed and then raped and then fell into a relationship with a much older man. This part is about her attempting to reckon with/reconcile herself with the trauma of this experience. The woman is now happily married and has a child, yet this trauma is given the largest portion of the book which I found to be an interesting and effective way to show how trauma lives within the brain, how it’s a complex thing, and how it can affect everything even after many years. Also interesting as due to the extreme obsession with the man (who clearly didn’t care much for her) I felt the story examined the ways in which young women’s brains are molded in a patriarchal society.
The second “part” is of exile, of being lost, and of being part of the diaspora. Along those lines it heavily explores how a place, a country, or a house can have such an overpowering effect on us. It made me think about all of the places I have lived and their different systems of control over me - which while obv completely different/ and I have not suffered in these same ways as in the book or as someone in the diaspora - she put into words some of these universal feelings which I found to be really amazing and beautifully written.
The last “part” of the story is about a very deep and supportive friendship between two women who bonded due to their complex pasts. This part was really lovely although the friendship seemed very one-sided in this particular story - the friendship was clearly a strong one, and Ellie (the friend) was a compelling character to which I wish more time was devoted to as I wanted to learn more about her.
Overall I thought this was a great read although it took me a bit of time to get through.
September 24, 2024
hiç sevmedim. duygulardan bahsedip durduğu hâlde hiçbir duyguya temas etmemesi, "öpüşürken birbirine değen aslında dudaklarımız değil, eril şiddet ve milliyetçiliğin kavurduğu beden parçalarıydı" gibi "ne alaka??" dedirten zoraki politizeliği, en yakın arkadaşından "queer bir yahudi kadın olan ve oxford'da postkolonyalizm çalışan ellie" şeklinde bahseden karakterin andavallığı ve kitap boyunca süren "bakın ben batıyı hiç sevmiyorum... anlaştık di mi??" batı kaka..." tavrı, ne idüğü belirsiz ömer karakteri. nereden tutsam elimde kalıyor. son olarak sırf iki kadının arkadaşlığı var diye hemen ferrante benzetmeleri gelmiş, bu "iki kadın = ferrante" denkleminden bıktığımı söylemeden edemeyeceğim.
June 17, 2021
Home, displacement, self-agency, and trauma are the strong themes of SAVAGE TONGUES. The characters are Middle Eastern, display gravitas in their bearing--ancient and contemporary histories embedded into their bodies, their bones. This isn’t a war or political novel, but the characters are heavy with it, the provisional nature of things: homes, lives. Primary characters are itinerants that were born to itinerants. The protagonist, Arezu (Iranian American), returns to her father’s house (which she just inherited) in Marbella, Spain. Twenty years ago when she went, her father didn’t show up, and instead sent forty-year-old Omar (Lebanese) to meet up with his seventeen-year-old daughter at the house, explain his absence. Omar seduces Arezu, who’d never experienced sexual intimacy. He has her in a Svengali-esque grip the entire summer. Arezu is intrigued, lulled from her usual torpor, and responds to Omar. She’s frightened and emboldened, spellbound and repulsed, and adolescently confused. Arezu’s body went wildly sexual the summer that she was raped every day.
If you have read the novel, MY DARK VANESSA, then you are familiar with an accurate portrayal of PTSD and sexual abuse, specifically sustained by a teen, as a target from an aggressive male with authority. Arezu observes Omar’s self-agency; she doesn’t believe that she has any for herself. Van Der Vliet Oloomi keenly conveys this trauma, also. The extreme contradictions; the shame; the humiliation; and the grief that stayed repressed, only to reappear decades later.
It was a bit incredible that Arezu has a loving husband at home, that she has a healthy marriage, when the eternal Omar fallout still consumes her. The narrative is unrelenting in its psychic pain and private torture. Occasionally, I felt weary that all these idle moments incited these intrusive thoughts, especially being there in Marbella.
Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi is an exquisite writer; I could quote a tranche of hypnotic passages, and will read any future work for its promise of poeticisms. I do think some leadership in editing would help balance out the different subtexts and subplots. For example, her friend, Ellie, the nomadic Israeli-American queer scholar, has an underdeveloped role, but at least her ethnic and sexual orientation statuses don’t feel like totems. I wanted to know more about her; however, she remained there, static, in the background. We get glimmers of her at intervals, but only attenuated glances.
Arezu’s trauma-filled memories were relived, revived, echoed, and each time it was like a cruel death. Instead of cause for movement, action (even mental action), it represented ennui, inertia. This book could have either been a longer, more matured work, secondary characters expanded, or a novella--pared down without losing any substance. She has lovely sentences, but there are also places where she lumbers a bit—either unwieldy or evinced with a flat figure of speech.
I recommend this to literature lovers, readers who can appreciate this level and specificity of trauma. It’s honest, raw, emotional. Heart-curdling at times, with painful precision. I finished the book still in torment, stirred up but not reassured of peace. A mirror to the Middle East?
Thank you to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for sending me an ARC for review.
If you have read the novel, MY DARK VANESSA, then you are familiar with an accurate portrayal of PTSD and sexual abuse, specifically sustained by a teen, as a target from an aggressive male with authority. Arezu observes Omar’s self-agency; she doesn’t believe that she has any for herself. Van Der Vliet Oloomi keenly conveys this trauma, also. The extreme contradictions; the shame; the humiliation; and the grief that stayed repressed, only to reappear decades later.
It was a bit incredible that Arezu has a loving husband at home, that she has a healthy marriage, when the eternal Omar fallout still consumes her. The narrative is unrelenting in its psychic pain and private torture. Occasionally, I felt weary that all these idle moments incited these intrusive thoughts, especially being there in Marbella.
Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi is an exquisite writer; I could quote a tranche of hypnotic passages, and will read any future work for its promise of poeticisms. I do think some leadership in editing would help balance out the different subtexts and subplots. For example, her friend, Ellie, the nomadic Israeli-American queer scholar, has an underdeveloped role, but at least her ethnic and sexual orientation statuses don’t feel like totems. I wanted to know more about her; however, she remained there, static, in the background. We get glimmers of her at intervals, but only attenuated glances.
Arezu’s trauma-filled memories were relived, revived, echoed, and each time it was like a cruel death. Instead of cause for movement, action (even mental action), it represented ennui, inertia. This book could have either been a longer, more matured work, secondary characters expanded, or a novella--pared down without losing any substance. She has lovely sentences, but there are also places where she lumbers a bit—either unwieldy or evinced with a flat figure of speech.
I recommend this to literature lovers, readers who can appreciate this level and specificity of trauma. It’s honest, raw, emotional. Heart-curdling at times, with painful precision. I finished the book still in torment, stirred up but not reassured of peace. A mirror to the Middle East?
Thank you to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for sending me an ARC for review.
January 23, 2021
The sense that this novel took itself terribly seriously outweighed any of its good points (of which there were many, especially at the start.) I'm beginning to wonder if I put all the novels together that started well, but developed into and ended in disappointment, would they make an altogether better book?
This is the story of a girl who is gifted an apartment in Spain, the scene of the crime so to speak, and rather than just not act on it, she goes there with a pal on a "recovery journey - to physically return to the sites of their trauma to map their stories in words and reverse the unbearable pain"
So far so good, except this isn't the site of Ellie's pain. Ellie is Israeli with empathy for Palestine and is torn. Marbella was never the site of her pain. So this was a selfish journey, purely so Arezu could retrace the steps of her Omar obsession. She's there to nod or ask a question whenever Arezu gets that faraway look on her face that means she's thinking about Omar, the guy she hooked up with 20 years ago in Marbella.
You know that friend that has an ex, that wasn't even an ex, like it was more of an infatuation, and they never stop going on about them? This is what reading this novel felt like. Sure, she shook it up by wrapping lots and lots of words around every single detail but where this differs from true literary fiction is that true literary fiction writers know when to pontificate and when to push on the action and it's not over every single thing. Not everything deserves a thorough, analytical audit, especially, just for example. noticing you have sunburn. Some times could go unsaid or don't need three sentences to describe. Nationhood plays second fiddle to a toxic relationship even if this could have easily been played out between the supposedly great friendship between the two.
The good bits: I liked that she called out and owned people's struggles with her name. It is a mouthful: Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi but it's not impossible to say and it's downright outrageous that she would be called upon a radio talk show and made to apologise for having a hard to say name.
I enjoyed the nod to Lorca, a spanish poet, novelist, playwright who was mysteriously murdered and never found.
I enjoyed the map tropes.
This book started well. The prose was well delivered, and evocative. Here were some sentences I enjoyed:
"Conscience can be slow to awaken. Especially when one is used to all manner of abuses."
"Omar robbed me of words: the most terrible parts may forever remain unspeakable"
"I wished I'd known the hidden geography of his grief."
The bad bits: I found the incessant harping on about Omar and the trauma that haunts her still a little repetitive and boring. Omar didn't speak like a real person and she recalls fragments of him at the drop of a hat. It became obvious halfway in that he would never materialise. For this reason, it was hard to believe in him or in their relationship. Why would a robot who issued single tense simple sentences exert such control over another, particularly one so prone to histrionic overthinking?
"You", he said to me, "are my lover." (typically robotic utterance from Omar, which was generally wrapped in 4-5 pages of hand-wringing angst about what he could have meant when he'd say such things.
The problem was that without meeting Omar, and seeing him in whatever reduced capacity he now had, she had no growth, which isn't always important but the writing wasn't quite good enough to get away with none. She tried to flit back and forth between present day and twenty years prior, but the effect was that we (I) did not want to hear another word about fecking Omar, please just shut up about him. Anything that moves at the pace of a glacier, from the point of view of a self obsessed and unself aware overwrought teen cannot lead anywhere else.
I found the friendship between her and Ellie implausible, mostly because of the dialogue which was wooden and strange. I found it oddly inconsiderate that she kept smoking in spite of the fact that her best friend had already expressed several times that she did not find it pleasant.
This author definitely has potential (and I know this isn't her first book. but she is still quite young) and I'm glad I'm become familiar with her work.
A huge thanks to NetGalley for the ARC.
This is the story of a girl who is gifted an apartment in Spain, the scene of the crime so to speak, and rather than just not act on it, she goes there with a pal on a "recovery journey - to physically return to the sites of their trauma to map their stories in words and reverse the unbearable pain"
So far so good, except this isn't the site of Ellie's pain. Ellie is Israeli with empathy for Palestine and is torn. Marbella was never the site of her pain. So this was a selfish journey, purely so Arezu could retrace the steps of her Omar obsession. She's there to nod or ask a question whenever Arezu gets that faraway look on her face that means she's thinking about Omar, the guy she hooked up with 20 years ago in Marbella.
You know that friend that has an ex, that wasn't even an ex, like it was more of an infatuation, and they never stop going on about them? This is what reading this novel felt like. Sure, she shook it up by wrapping lots and lots of words around every single detail but where this differs from true literary fiction is that true literary fiction writers know when to pontificate and when to push on the action and it's not over every single thing. Not everything deserves a thorough, analytical audit, especially, just for example. noticing you have sunburn. Some times could go unsaid or don't need three sentences to describe. Nationhood plays second fiddle to a toxic relationship even if this could have easily been played out between the supposedly great friendship between the two.
The good bits: I liked that she called out and owned people's struggles with her name. It is a mouthful: Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi but it's not impossible to say and it's downright outrageous that she would be called upon a radio talk show and made to apologise for having a hard to say name.
I enjoyed the nod to Lorca, a spanish poet, novelist, playwright who was mysteriously murdered and never found.
I enjoyed the map tropes.
This book started well. The prose was well delivered, and evocative. Here were some sentences I enjoyed:
"Conscience can be slow to awaken. Especially when one is used to all manner of abuses."
"Omar robbed me of words: the most terrible parts may forever remain unspeakable"
"I wished I'd known the hidden geography of his grief."
The bad bits: I found the incessant harping on about Omar and the trauma that haunts her still a little repetitive and boring. Omar didn't speak like a real person and she recalls fragments of him at the drop of a hat. It became obvious halfway in that he would never materialise. For this reason, it was hard to believe in him or in their relationship. Why would a robot who issued single tense simple sentences exert such control over another, particularly one so prone to histrionic overthinking?
"You", he said to me, "are my lover." (typically robotic utterance from Omar, which was generally wrapped in 4-5 pages of hand-wringing angst about what he could have meant when he'd say such things.
The problem was that without meeting Omar, and seeing him in whatever reduced capacity he now had, she had no growth, which isn't always important but the writing wasn't quite good enough to get away with none. She tried to flit back and forth between present day and twenty years prior, but the effect was that we (I) did not want to hear another word about fecking Omar, please just shut up about him. Anything that moves at the pace of a glacier, from the point of view of a self obsessed and unself aware overwrought teen cannot lead anywhere else.
I found the friendship between her and Ellie implausible, mostly because of the dialogue which was wooden and strange. I found it oddly inconsiderate that she kept smoking in spite of the fact that her best friend had already expressed several times that she did not find it pleasant.
This author definitely has potential (and I know this isn't her first book. but she is still quite young) and I'm glad I'm become familiar with her work.
A huge thanks to NetGalley for the ARC.
October 28, 2021
A young Iranian woman goes to meet an elder relative who immigrated to Spain. They begin a sexual relationship which is clearly consisting of dominance and subservience. She eventually leaves but after he does she inherits her apartment. And with other relationships she looks back at her and Spain’s history.
August 3, 2021
Thanks to NetGalley and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for this arc, which I received in exchange for an honest review. I will post that review upon publication, but in the meantime, I’ll share that I found this one deeply disturbing.
TW for rape, sexual assault, and grooming, all in relation to a child.
One of the toughest reads I’ve experienced in a long time. I absolutely do not recommend this and will share further details in that aforementioned review.
Updated 8/3/21
2 stars
In _Savage Tongues_, Van der Vliet Oloomi takes readers into the traumatic recollections primarily but not exclusively of Arezu, the m.c. At present, Arezu is in her late 30s, traveling to the apartment her father left her, and reconnecting with her closest friend, Ellie.
The purpose of Arezu's trip to the apartment after a 20-year absence is to reconsider and process a horrific period of trauma in her life, which actually took place while she was living in this apartment. Rather than showing up himself to care for her 17-year-old daughter, Arezu's father sends a 40-year-old male step-relative to keep an eye on Arezu. Instead, this individual - Omar - grooms, assaults, rapes, and otherwise traumatizes Arezu for months in person and then for the next 20+ years psychologically. The novel is a painful exploration of Arezu's grappling with her abuse: her notions of responsibility, the details of her grooming, and the minutiae of Omar's various assaults on her mind and body.
For me, this novel is the literary equivalent of the _Hostel_ film franchise. It's torture for the sake of torture. As a person who works closely and regularly with folks who are and/or have been raped, assaulted, and otherwise victimized, I appreciate the depiction of trauma as an ongoing and permanently impactful state, and there is a fair amount of realistic processing here. As a reader, I felt sick the entire time I read; that's why I tore through this book in two rapid sittings. The constant rehashing, the details, and the use of words like "affair" in place of systematic rape or other more accurate phrasing are crazing making.
I think there is an audience who may find this novel cathartic for their own processing, but I would never suggest that those folks tackle this book without the encouragement and close handholding of a professional. Everyone else...there's just no need.
I'll look for other work from this author because I appreciate the style, but I'd like to _Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind_ this one from my brain. Strongly NOT recommended.
TW: rape, sexual harassment, sexual assault, all of a child
TW for rape, sexual assault, and grooming, all in relation to a child.
One of the toughest reads I’ve experienced in a long time. I absolutely do not recommend this and will share further details in that aforementioned review.
Updated 8/3/21
2 stars
In _Savage Tongues_, Van der Vliet Oloomi takes readers into the traumatic recollections primarily but not exclusively of Arezu, the m.c. At present, Arezu is in her late 30s, traveling to the apartment her father left her, and reconnecting with her closest friend, Ellie.
The purpose of Arezu's trip to the apartment after a 20-year absence is to reconsider and process a horrific period of trauma in her life, which actually took place while she was living in this apartment. Rather than showing up himself to care for her 17-year-old daughter, Arezu's father sends a 40-year-old male step-relative to keep an eye on Arezu. Instead, this individual - Omar - grooms, assaults, rapes, and otherwise traumatizes Arezu for months in person and then for the next 20+ years psychologically. The novel is a painful exploration of Arezu's grappling with her abuse: her notions of responsibility, the details of her grooming, and the minutiae of Omar's various assaults on her mind and body.
For me, this novel is the literary equivalent of the _Hostel_ film franchise. It's torture for the sake of torture. As a person who works closely and regularly with folks who are and/or have been raped, assaulted, and otherwise victimized, I appreciate the depiction of trauma as an ongoing and permanently impactful state, and there is a fair amount of realistic processing here. As a reader, I felt sick the entire time I read; that's why I tore through this book in two rapid sittings. The constant rehashing, the details, and the use of words like "affair" in place of systematic rape or other more accurate phrasing are crazing making.
I think there is an audience who may find this novel cathartic for their own processing, but I would never suggest that those folks tackle this book without the encouragement and close handholding of a professional. Everyone else...there's just no need.
I'll look for other work from this author because I appreciate the style, but I'd like to _Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind_ this one from my brain. Strongly NOT recommended.
TW: rape, sexual harassment, sexual assault, all of a child
January 16, 2021
Savage Tongues is a book that covers several themes, the principal of which are predatory romance and living in the West as someone from the Middle East. The story allowed some interesting and thoughtful commentary on those two points; however, it didn't have enough space to fully elaborate on the second, and the first felt a little overdone at times. I could relate to Azeru in some ways, and I wanted to feel compassion for her, but now and again her unrelenting self-pity made me want to tell her to pull herself together. Overall, though, this was an enjoyable read, with lyrical prose that really drew you into the moment with the characters. It was my first time reading this author, but I would definitely pick up another of her books in the future. Try Savage Tongues is you like thought-provoking and emotional fiction. For me it was a 3.5-star read that I would round up to four stars, rather than down to three.
I received this book as a free eBook ARC via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
I received this book as a free eBook ARC via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
August 8, 2021
I really wanted to like this book way more than I did. I’m grateful to Netgalley for the chance to read and share my thoughts on it. I thought this author does descriptive writing well, but I felt like this was just that. It didn’t feel like a story that I could follow and the characters felt like tools for the description. I am ok with a book with a character that bounces between past and present (especially to deal with an unprocessed trauma), but this was repetitive to the point of being a challenge to get through. I do think there was a lot of potential, but it needed to be fleshed out a little more to be a complete novel. Arezu first came to Spain when she was 17 to spend it with her father who never showed up. Instead he sent an allowance to her through his step-nephew a man in his 40’s that entered into an abusive sexual relationship with Arezu. In this story Arezu and her best friend Ellie are returning to that apartment she stayed at (her father left it to her because he is completely useless). I’ve rounded up from 2.5.
August 20, 2021
This was definitely a DNF for me. I couldn't make it more than 16% of the way through it, as hard as I tried.
There wasn't even a semblance of a plot that had made any appearance by that point, aside from the author's obsession with anti-zionist rhetoric, relying on false information and buzzwords like "settler-colonial project." However, I couldn't quite see how that would have fit into the story, let alone being brought up repeatedly.
Instead of an intriguing story with engaging characters, the MC just rambled and bored me. The 16% I did listen to didn't hold my interest at all, as much as I tried to get interested in the story. However, with no discernible plot and a character that I couldn't force myself to care about, I couldn't justify continuing to listen to a barely coherent diatribe.
Save yourself the trouble and skip this one. It isn't worth the time.
There wasn't even a semblance of a plot that had made any appearance by that point, aside from the author's obsession with anti-zionist rhetoric, relying on false information and buzzwords like "settler-colonial project." However, I couldn't quite see how that would have fit into the story, let alone being brought up repeatedly.
Instead of an intriguing story with engaging characters, the MC just rambled and bored me. The 16% I did listen to didn't hold my interest at all, as much as I tried to get interested in the story. However, with no discernible plot and a character that I couldn't force myself to care about, I couldn't justify continuing to listen to a barely coherent diatribe.
Save yourself the trouble and skip this one. It isn't worth the time.
August 7, 2021
"From that heaving pit of darkness, a golden tunnel of light shot up toward the heavens"....
...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.
...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.
September 20, 2021
This novel, a long and internalized rumination on trauma and recovery, is not for readers that prefer plot-driven novels. This is truly reflective and literary. The narrator draws deep parallels between sexual abuse and loving relationships with racism, Islamophobia, anti Semitism, occupation of the West Bank, Sunni and Shiite, intoxication and sobriety, night and day, long and short, and any other dichotomy. She reflects on the oppressed as oppressors and Islamophobic Americans loving the Alahambra as a tourist destination. Readers need to be comfortable with not having complete closure on the events between the narrator and Omar. She is suffering PTSD and has no resolution herself so it would be ridiculous for the author to tie things up to please readers. It is a difficult topic to read about and I needed frequent breaks but wanted to return to it soon after putting it down. The one fault I find is that the narrator is too forgiving for my liking. Some actions are pure evil and might have an explanation but not an excuse.
September 3, 2022
This is a harrowing read, at least for me. For any person with darkness in their past, this novel cuts deep. The writing is exquisite, and I appreciated the self-referential line about the main character (an author) never being able to write a plot-driven work. This is a meditation on how our personal and political histories never leave us. The ghosts of our pasts are with us, and we carry them and converse with them every day. It was an incredibly hard read for me, though. This isn’t a novel to breeze through like a holiday.
June 1, 2021
Savage Tongues by Azareen Van Dee Lit Vliet Oloomi was for me a complex, intense, dark and intriguing storyline. In my opinion, the author did a good job creating and developing the characters. Without giving away any spoilers, I was drawn into Arezu’s story and found myself both shocked, horrified and saddened as events in her life began to unfold. The author is to be commended for her writing because you could almost feel the pain and trauma Ariel experienced especially as she struggled to understand and come to terms with the affair she had as a teenager with an older man that occurred decades earlier. Arezu and her friend Ellie discuss these events and bring the memories and ghosts of Arezu’s pain and trauma so that Arezu can begin her healing journey. I received an Advance Reader Copy and these opinions are solely my own. This book is well written and I rated it a four.
June 1, 2021
I read the first 30 pages of Savage Tongues and really got wrapped up in the story. It is told in first-person, and the book opens while the protagonist is on an airplane, headed to Marbella, Spain. The reader quickly learns that the protagonist is returning to Marbella, to destroy the evidence of her love affair with a man named Omar.
The language in this book is sensual and lush; if I closed my eyes I could envision myself in Iran, or Spain, or another area of the United States.
I definitely plan to finish this book!
The language in this book is sensual and lush; if I closed my eyes I could envision myself in Iran, or Spain, or another area of the United States.
I definitely plan to finish this book!
August 8, 2022
When you put words to feelings. Displacement. Trauma. Identity. Friendship. Love and hope. This novel is phenomenal. I'll love it always.
May 24, 2021
Savage Tongues by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi is a story about a woman going back to visit a place she used to live where she experienced an abusive relationship. As the back cover states, the story begins 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. The big problem I had was that it is written like a person analyzing a relationship and has very little feeling. There really isn't a story beyond how she is upset at how Omar abused her and she can't move on. I found the main character Arezu very unlikable and she overanalyzes everything repeatedly. There were bits and pieces where it was promising but not nearly enough. The cover gives it a textbook feel and that is exactly how I found it.
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