“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.
Genre: Literary Fiction
"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.
Genre: Literary Fiction
Praise for this book
"In Savage Tongues, Van der Vliet Oloomi establishes herself as a skilled cartographer of trauma. With a remarkably clear vision and dynamic, colorful prose, she takes us along on her journey into the deepest recesses of an embattled mind. This is a book for those who expect from the novel far more than a story." - Amir Ahmadi Arian
"Against the gorgeous, punishing landscapes of Andalusia, the narrator of Savage Tongues relentlessly and movingly anatomizes the links between violence—both personal and systemic—and desire. This uncompromising novel lives at the border of memory and dream, restlessly seeking a logic that can transform cruelty into love." - Garth Greenwell
"In Savage Tongues the immensely gifted Van der Vliet Oloomi describes a woman walking the razor thin line between memory and madness as she tries to rescue her younger self. Happily Arezu does not walk the line alone. This vivid account of the haunting nature of trauma is also a wonderful testimonial to friendship. A resonant and powerful novel." - Margot Livesey
"Savage Tongues touches all the bases—identity, sex, power, youth and age, the present and the past—and knocks it out of the park. Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi is our woke Marguerite Duras." - Francine Prose
"A luxuriant fevered quest for reclamation, Savage Tongues is political, poetical, and spooky good." - Joy Williams
"Against the gorgeous, punishing landscapes of Andalusia, the narrator of Savage Tongues relentlessly and movingly anatomizes the links between violence—both personal and systemic—and desire. This uncompromising novel lives at the border of memory and dream, restlessly seeking a logic that can transform cruelty into love." - Garth Greenwell
"In Savage Tongues the immensely gifted Van der Vliet Oloomi describes a woman walking the razor thin line between memory and madness as she tries to rescue her younger self. Happily Arezu does not walk the line alone. This vivid account of the haunting nature of trauma is also a wonderful testimonial to friendship. A resonant and powerful novel." - Margot Livesey
"Savage Tongues touches all the bases—identity, sex, power, youth and age, the present and the past—and knocks it out of the park. Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi is our woke Marguerite Duras." - Francine Prose
"A luxuriant fevered quest for reclamation, Savage Tongues is political, poetical, and spooky good." - Joy Williams
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