Savage Tongues, Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi
Savage Tongues, Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi
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Savage Tongues

Author: Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi

Narrator: Samara Naeymi

Unabridged: 8 hr 34 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Recorded Books

Published: 08/03/2021


Synopsis

From a celebrated, utterly singular literary voice, a personal and political exploration of desire, power, and human connection about a young woman caught in an affair with a much older man

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 his stepnephew, Omar, a forty-year-old Lebanese man, to deliver her a
weekly allowance. As the weeks progress, Arezu is drawn into a mercurial, charged, and ultimately catastrophic affair with Omar, a relationship that shatters her 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 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.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Kasa on 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......more

Goodreads review by Nazli on May 22, 2023

Savage Tongues feels like if Edward Said were a grown-up Lolita who wrote about her 'sexual encounters' with a fellow Middle Eastern man that happened twenty years ago with the intensity of Elena Ferrante and the narrative tricks of Rachel Cusk. I couldn't put it down. Even though the story was full......more

Goodreads review by Stephanie B on June 07, 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......more

Goodreads review by Doreen on August 01, 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 the......more

Goodreads review by Pinar on February 28, 2021

I loved this book and the friendship between the two women. It allows them to survive trauma, war and displacement, and makes them fiercely resilient in a dark world.......more