SAVAGE TONGUES

A woman travels to Spain to confront her traumatic past.

Arezu is 17 when she has an affair with Omar, her stepmother’s nephew. Affair is too strong a word; Omar is 40 years old, and Arezu doesn’t so much consent as she is compelled into a relationship with him. Twenty years later, she’s still trying to sort things out. That’s where Van der Vliet Oloomi’s latest novel picks up. Arezu returns to Spain to try to confront, or at least contend with, her past—and the lingering effects it has had on her life. “How does one document in language an experience of pain so totalizing that it refuses the fixed nature of words altogether?” she asks. Van der Vliet Oloomi’s strategy is to forgo plot—and most of the other conventions of fiction—in favor of a book-length monologue. Arezu considers not only her own past, but, more generally, racism, colonialism (her mother is Iranian, her father British), and Israeli-Palestinian politics—Arezu’s Israeli best friend joins her on her trip—among other things. The result can feel oddly claustrophobic, even solipsistic, as Arezu sorts through the seemingly infinite gradations of her feelings. The novel breathes when Arezu manages to step outside herself, to describe her brother, for instance, who was once beaten in a racist attack, or her friend, Ellie, who comes with her to Spain. Arezu’s trauma is real, but there is something self-indulgent about the way she turns the memories over and over in her mind. She seems to savor her own pain in a way that the author doesn’t seem fully aware of.

An intense but ultimately claustrophobic book in which a woman can’t get outside her own mind.