Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi Seeks Inescapable Landscapes

At the Paris Review, Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi discusses her latest novel, Savage Tongues, and how its evocative descriptions of landscapes shaped her characters’ existences. “Landscape is one of the things I most love writing about,” Oloomi says, “because it is so sensory, evocative. All of our memories are nested in spaces—in sights, sounds, smells. So I don’t think of landscape as separate from character and have never conceived of setting as a backdrop to the consciousness of the characters who inhabit my novels. To me they are inseparable elements of a life.”