Savage Tongues
A Novel
-
- $15.99
Publisher Description
"Oloomi’s novel examines trauma in a multifaceted way...facing the challenges of sustaining an identity in countries with blurred borders and marginalized peoples, where vestiges of the lost past remain embedded in the landscape." — Los Angeles Review of Books
"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).
Written with the intensity of early Marguerite Duras and Ferrante's Days of Abandonment, Savage Tongues is an autobiographical novel that weaves personal and political history, exploring questions of violence, post-colonial identity, and inter-faith friendship.
At seventeen, Arezu, an Iranian American teenager, travels to Andalusia in southern Spain—a historically Islamic and Sephardic space—to reconnect with her estranged father. Instead, she is left in the care of Omar, a forty-year-old Lebanese man, and drawn into a charged and catastrophic relationship that shatters her just at the cusp of adulthood.
Two decades later, Arezu inherits the same apartment where her life was irrevocably altered. She returns with her best friend, Ellie, a Jewish scholar devoted to the Palestinian cause, to excavate the place together. As the two push through visions of the brutal past and symbols of future cruelty, asking what it means to find agency in the face of violence, the lush landscapes of Andalucia and Israel/Palestine echo each other like ghostly apparitions, haunting one another across time and memory.
Equal parts Shirley Jackson, Rachel Cusk, and Clarice Lispector, Savage Tongues re-writes the narratives we assign to love, power, and memory, the profound intimacy born of the deepest pain, and the life-long search for healing.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The narrator of Whiting Award–winner Oloomi's uneven cerebral latest (after Call Me Zebra) reconsiders a relationship she had as a teenager with an older man. Writer Arezu returns from the U.S. to an apartment in Marbella, Spain, where she lived 20 years earlier, when she was 17. During that "strange, wild summer," she had an all-consuming sexual relationship with the 40-year-old Omar, whom she describes as "my lover, my torturer, my confidant and enemy." Her best friend, Ellie, flies in to help Arezu process her emotions (as with the friends' past "recovery journeys," the pair seek to "reverse the language-destroying effects of unbearable pain"). The plot mostly stays put—Arezu swims, the women go out at night, Ellie does a tarot reading—with the narrative focused on Arezu's inner turmoil. While her self-analysis effectively conveys her anguish and Omar's manipulation and emotional abuse, the prose is often stilted ("The injustices he'd assailed against me... could not be contained in a single temporal dimension"). Musings on Middle Eastern politics, including a trip to Israel and occupied Palestine with Ellie, add insight, but in the end, the weighty themes are sunk by portentous delivery. Readers can take a pass.
