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?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.
About the author
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.
Summary
"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.
Additional text
Most Anticipated Book of the Summer from Vulture, Refinery29, Lit Hub, and Hey Alma Most Anticipated Book of the Year from Harper's Bazaar, Lit Hub, and The Millions Most Anticipated Book of August from The A.V. Club, Bustle, vol. 1 Brooklyn, and Lambda Literary "A love story of the most fevered, brutal order...The prose is propulsive, erotic, and darkly dreamlike, recalling the early novels of Marguerite Duras...[SAVAGE TONGUES] interrogates the narratives we assign to the past and asks what we are allowed to expect of those who love us." —Vulture "Not many writers can convey both great beauty and horror at the same time, but in Savage Tongues, Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi does so deftly...Oloomi works through questions of sex, friendship, trauma, and the obliteration of the self, with an inventive approach to time, setting, and character...Oloomi’s sentences, whether evoking pain or pleasure, are electric, filled with life. If I’m honest, when I was reading, I often wished I had written them. The imagery is filmic, and sometimes piercing." —Amina Cain, The Paris Review "A novel of ideas...Though steeped in sex and haunted by fleshy frights...their exorcism is mostly a matter of language." —Washington Post "Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi's stunning new novel is a hauntingly beautiful depiction of the way past traumas grip at our insides, threatening to tear us apart years after we've experienced them...Savage Tongues is rigorous in its exploration of the effects that violence and corruption have on our conception of ourselves." —Refinery29 "This is a pulls-no-punches look at abandonment, ownership, trauma, and the convergence of political and personal pain. It is also a touching ode to friendship, a partial salve for these wounds." —Lit Hub "Written with the intensity of early Duras and Ferrante’s Days of Abandonment...With the help of a dear friend, Arezu excavates and puts words to her past trauma in this novel about love, friendship, identity, and displacement." —The Millions “A luxuriant fevered quest for reclamation, Savage Tongues is political, poetical, and spooky good.” —Joy Williams “Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi’s Savage Tongues is an international novel careful to record the beauty of the natural world while also chronicling the harm people do to one another in this world. Van der Vliet Oloomi wants to know what we can expect of our families—our fathers, our lovers—when we are the same people who will wage war and destroy our planet in order to do so. This book is relentless in the best way." —Jericho Brown, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Tradition “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, author of Cleanness and What Belongs to You "In Savage Tongues the immensely gifted Van der Vliet Oloomi describes a
