Review of SAVAGE TONGUES by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi (New Release)

 2 Stars

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.