This book was probably better than I’m giving it credit for and is a victim of an absolute dud of a reading year. There was a lot of telling and not enough showing. I am exhausted by the number of books recently that feel the need to lay out every aspect of a character up front instead of revealing it over time. I don’t need an author to hold my hand and give me a bio for every character, their beliefs, and their intentions when they are introduced.

A beautiful and probing literary novel that tackles memory, trauma, agency, sexuality, displacement, and erasure. A fascinating and different way to explore the Palestinian cause, which is part of this important book.

This book enjoyed a remarkably strong start, but at about a third of the way in, it suffered from inexplicable plot drag, and never seemed to let up. Very nice writing, but didn't seem to know where to go with it. Three and a half stars.

This piercingly magnificent, brilliant, sensual novel from the PEN/Faulkner award-winner, Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, is her third and by far her more exquisite offering. By giving a methodical insight into power dynamics in relationships, at a level that is both personal and cultural, Oloomi taps into a deeply controversial, but very pertinent subject.
By explaining the dilemmas of a deeply exploitative relationship, the author very sensitively weaves narratives around gender, religion and sexuality, and explores how our notions of these eventually shape up society.
The novel opens with the narrator, Arezu, setting off on a visit to Marbella on the Costa del Sol of Spain, along with her friend, Ellie. A daughter of a British father and an Iranian mother, Arezu’s plans this visit after her father transfers his apartment in Marbella to her. She’s only ever spent one summer there, back when she was 17. That was when she pursued a passionate love affair with her stepmother’s handsome 40-year-old nephew, Omar.
Arezu is now 30, married and an accomplished writer but Marbella is where she secretly longs to return to, convinced that with this visit she will be able to come to terms with “that strange, wild summer spent in this moonlit city of salt and gulls and palm trees, on this dark and playful coast, living in father’s vacant and abandoned apartment, learning to ride Omar in the blazing afternoon heat.” She thinks by facing her past in this manner she will finally be able to overcome it.
The author’s handling of the deeply carnal relationship between Omar and Arezu is masterful, to say the least. She explores the deep exploitation that inherently entails an older man-younger girl relationship, but at the same time she allows the protagonist to also examine her own part in the “affair”. However, there is nothing hunky-dory about this relationship. Throughout the novel, there is a sense of doom, of something sinister taking place.
The strong point of the novel is the deep internal dialogue that Arezu engages in, which clearly depicts the emotional trauma she faced many years ago and still faces in so many ways. We never fully get to know what the trauma is about though – something that perhaps could’ve been handled in a more conscious manner.
The story takes off in the second part of the novel as the interaction between the characters gets more nuanced, the scenes more vivid. All in all, this is an intoxicating, thoughtful novel exploring the intricacies of personal and cultural trauma. It is also a story of the incredible power that female friendships have to save us from pain. Despite its vagueness, this is one novel you will remember for a long time to come if only for its eloquence and sheer description of single human emotions.

<blockquote>Ellie swam up to me. "Hey," she whispered, cupping her hand under my head and lifting it so I could hear her. "I was thinking about how, in the mystical Jewish tradition, reading histories that have vanished, that have been hidden from view through time's erasure, through the systemically concealed violence against our people, is considered an approximation to nothingness, to Ein Sof, to the divine. So maybe interrogating a space like Al-Andalus, like the apartment, however wretched it was — a place where the past exists as an eternal disappearance — is like entering the void itself, the place where language feels divine because it is capable of naming that which has been made to disappear, of articulating the unspeakable. Do you think that's possible?"</blockquote>

Do you? Because I always think about these things during casual drunken ocean swims.

Savage Tongues, by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, reads more like an extended psychotherapy session than it does a novel — it's an academic exercise, not an entertainment.

Arezu, an Iranian-American, heads to Marbella, to the apartment where she stayed as a seventeen-year-old and fell into a sexual relationship with a much older man. Fortunately, she brings along her best friend Ellie, a red-haired Palestinian-supporting Israeli, to help her clean the place.

<blockquote>Friendship, I thought, is a form of witness. She had received my testimony. She had held it with tenderness and love. She had taken care with my story. </blockquote>

While Ellie scours the bathroom, Arezu plumbs the depth of her memory of Omar, instinctively maintaining that she was complicit in all that transpired. It's clear to anyone of this #metoo generation that Omar is a pervy predator and she'd been seriously gaslit.

<blockquote>I was in acute pain, lonely in ways I was too young to grasp, and there was no one around to ask me to articulate my suffering, to help me fix it in language, so I raged on like a wounded animal who knows not what to do except soothe her pain with more pain, lust after the final blow of death that will put an end to it all. I became hooked on Omar.</blockquote>

The protagonist is a writer and is fixated on articulating things that are as yet beyond her understanding. I thought this was my way into the novel, as I'm trying to come to terms with my inadequacy in expressing my emotional self, to accept that some experiences are inexpressible, to differentiate between what needs expressing and what doesn't. When does language help and when does it hinder?

One who comes to this novel with the wrong mindset might easily find it laughable.

<blockquote>The relationship between our political pain and our attraction to destructive men was not always clear; perhaps being with men who make us scream and gasp and moan takes us beyond the confines of language, back into our original pain; it allows us to explore and later confront the patriarchal and patriotic leaning of the colonial social project.</blockquote>

Arezu sees the value of sharing personal pain as a means of political agency, but struggles "to process your own loss of dignity without demonizing him or subjecting him to the dominant narrative of the Arab man."

The jacket copy makes comparisons to Marguerite Duras and Shirley Jackson, Rachel Cusk and Samanta Schweblin. I detect no trace of the latter pair — there is nothing easy about the writing or subtle about its social commentary. It may be a brave novel, but I found no joy in it.

This is a heavy book. The added sociopolitical layers don't add much depth to the characters, needlessly weighing down the plot with theory. The psychological exploration of Arezu's trauma feels valid and true, but its payoff as a novel wasn't worth the investment.

[I just realized I've had Oloomi's Call me Zebra on my shelf unread for a couple of years. It may stay that way for a while.]

This book has so many different aspects to discuss. The family drama is so engaging and richly written. The relationships take on a voice that makes you feel like you are present during the scenes. Wonderfully written and engaging.

In the novel; Savage Tongues, we are introduced to the narrator, a happily married and successful writer Arezu and her best friend Elle as they move into the be apartment, that Arezu had inherited from her father, in Marbella on the Costa Del Sol in Spain.

It was at this same apartment twenty years ago that then 17 year old Arezu had a sexual encounter one hot summer with her 40 year old cousin.

The ghost of that encounter is scantily retold and the trauma that Arezu suffers from is not fully developed in the story.

Some parts of the story reads like heady essays while other parts, when Elle and Arezu are together, are powerful.

This book was very well written, but while the author shows her writing prowess, I felt her story telling lacking. The story felt sluggish and of a one track mind. How many different ways can one describe abuse and desire? I can see the importance of this story and how pervasive a man's hold on a woman (both physically and mentally) can be, but it felt like this story was on repeat. Let's play through these memories and go through every emotion that can possibly be felt.
I have heard that this book showcases friendship. Sure, if someone wants to say that, but while her friendship was an underlying current through this book, I didn't feel the power of a friendship that can pull her out of her situation.
For me, the story was lacking, but the author's style is quite lyrical and it was enjoyable to read her work and watch the words be kneaded on a page to create something powerful.

This is an intense book that is hard to read. I can recognize the writing talent of the author, and I really appreciate the political parts of the story, as it relates to the identities of the two best friends. This book delves deeply into trauma and looks at it straight on, including at times being uncomfortable with the narrator's own thoughts.

I think this is one of those books that most people are going to either love or hate. I'm happy to say that I'm in the love catagory.

Savage Tongues, I suspect, is a work of auto-fiction. The main character, Arezu--an Iranian American woman--travels to Marbella, Spain, to claim the apartment she inherits from her estranged father. This apartment was the site of an affair that a teenaged Arezu had with a 40-year-old man two decades earlier. The trip to claim the apartment becomes a reckoning with this past and the ghosts of what happened to her teenaged self.

Arezu travels with her best friend Ellie, who lived in Israel for many years and supports the Palestinian cause there. As the two women travel to the apartment and grapple with Arezu's past there, Oloomi weaves in references to other traumas experienced by the women as well as the larger geopolitical community. In a relatively short book, Oloomi touches on the Israeli occupation of Palestine, colonialism more broadly, and feminism and sexual politics. While this be unwieldy, and at times does lean that way, it felt like a brilliant way for Arezu to unpack her complicated feelings around her assault.

I am a sucker for books where you are trapped in the complex mind of the main character and this is no exception. Oloomi does an excellent job in articulating the trauma Arezu is processing, brought to the surface by being back in Spain. The mental journey she goes on the week or so that she and Ellie are in Marbella is exhausting but felt so stunningly real.

At times the book felt a bit repetitive, I think because we are in Arezu's mind as she is spiraling. Some of these repetitions felt artful, like that of one of Omar's sayings to her. Others felt a bit unnecessary in such a short book.

One final thought: this book really walks the line between acknowledging the inappropriateness of teenaged Arezu's relationship with Omar, but she does also acknowledge her feelings for him. I found this to be realistic of a young woman taken advantage of an older man, but I know that it will not sit well with some readers.

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.

Confronting 'adolescent fragility' (hede)

Excising ghosts through the language of trauma propels PEN/Faulkner Award winner Azareen Van Der Vilet Oloomi’s important new novel through a deeply introspective monologue that will satisfy some, horrify others and leave the rest of us looking from the outside in.

If that sounds like a mouthful, it’s because it is. It’s not just that “Savage Tongues” is a cerebral read, — it is that, too — it’s that Arezu’s reasons for confronting a past two decades gone is indeterminate even to her: Is she banishing or bargaining with the pain of abuse that drips from nearly every page?

Twenty years ago, Arezu was a 17-year-old Iranian American going to Spain to spend the summer with her estranged father. He never shows at his apartment and instead sends as surrogates a weekly allowance and the care of his step-nephew, Omar, a 40-year-old Lebanese man. Through the early summer, a tortuous affair develops, ultimately scarring Arezu just as she is crossing the threshold from teen to adult.


Twenty years later, Arezu has inherited the property and — through language fraught with her own internal conflicts — finds herself “returning to one of the ugliest episodes of my youth: that strange, wild summer I’d spent in this moonlit city of salt and gulls and palm trees, on this dark and playful coast, living in my father’s vacant and abandoned apartment.”

Returning with Arezu is her best friend, Elle, an Israeli-American scholar passionate about Palestine. Together, they attempt to articulate expressions of abuse, eroticism, suffering and healing while simultaneously questioning, “How does one document in language the experience of pain so tantalizing that it refuses the fixed nature of words altogether?”

Yet in this novel, words are the main conveyance of those expressions. Largely eschewing plot and other narrative conventions, the story progresses through inner revelations, leaving the reader only brief gasps within a claustrophobic tale, as when Arezu details a racist and violent attack on her brother, or snippets of Elle’s backstory and Palestinian causes.

Those who have lived through abuse will find either solace or torment in the pages of this revealing novel. Others will find understanding — a beginning comprehension of the attempt to voice the excavation of profound pain.

This was a roller-coaster. My gut and brain switched so many times I lost count, and I can’t choose which one to write from. Here is another one with strong central characters supporting the story. You all know how much I love character-driven plots and this one delivers with a bang. They really were the best thing about this book for me. It’s a shame that I had several issues with the technicalities. The writing is unnecessarily complicated, and the characters have confusing and unrealistic dialogue and interactions. This is a case of the author trying too hard and therefore the results sound fake. It felt too long for a book under 300 pages and I struggled at times to keep going. The author is very talented, and I think they just needed to be reined in a tad on this one. Sorry all, it seems as if my brain prevailed.

Thank you for the opportunity to read this.

This was a different kind of read for me, and overall very unique as a novel in general. It reminded of many A24 films in that it was relatively light on plot, but very adept at imagery and conveying themes. The writing is adroit and powerful throughout and it's easy to see every detail that the narrator describes. The writing also achieves the conveyance of trauma, both personal and inherited, that the narrator struggles through. For a while, I was waiting for more a story to develop, but then realized that wasn't necessarily the point. This is the definition of a slow burn, and it is a strong one at that.

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.

An intense and claustrophobic account of a woman remembering a complicated and troubling relationship. I think the author does an excellent job at depicting a relationship of an uneven power dynamic (older man, under age woman) while also attending to the trauma that ensues from this kind of formative experience. It's unsettling and vivid. Not for everyone.

Oh sigh. This just annoyed the heck out of me early on and I DNF. The characters = especially Arezu- are so self important and the writing so mannered that it didn't engage me. Thanks to netgalley for the ARC but I can't recommend it.

I’m judging the L.A. Times 2020 and 2021 fiction contest. It’d be generous to call what I’m doing upon my first cursory glance—reading. I also don’t take this task lightly. As a fellow writer and lover of words and books, I took this position—in hopes of being a good literary citizen. My heart aches for all the writers who have a debut at this time. What I can share now is the thing that held my attention and got this book from the perspective pile into the read further pile.

"Yes, I have lived an itinerant life. I’ve lived here and there: in the sun-bleached streets of Los Angeles; the dull roads of Reno; the moody, superior streets of New York; the gritty, pulsating avenues of Chicago."
Eager to read more.

This book just did not work for me. I’ve read Azareen’s other books and while they have the same frantic, almost breathless pacing, they were readable. This book’s focus of a teenager and a 40 year old man having a sexual relationship that is clearly abusive, was just not something I could stomach.

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