What Belongs to You
Ratings20
Average rating3.8
"A haunting novel of erotic obsession by a major new talent On an unseasonably warm autumn day, an American teacher walks down a stairwell beneath Sofia's National Palace of Culture, looking for sex. Among the stalls of a public bathroom he encounters Mitko, a charismatic young hustler. He returns to Mitko again and again over the next few months, and their trysts grow increasingly intimate and unnerving as the enigma of this young man becomes inseparable from that of his homeland, a country with a difficult past and an uncertain future. What Belongs to You is a stunning debut about an American expat struggling with his own complicated inheritance while navigating a foreign culture. Lyrical and intense, it tells the story of a man caught between longing and resentment, unable to separate desire from danger, and faced with the impossibility of understanding those he most longs to know"--
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Une histoire poignante, celle d'un professeur américain installé en Bulgarie après avoir fui le Sud américain profond et son père homophobe. A Sofia, il rencontre un jeune prostitué bulgare avec lequel il va nouer une relation faite de désir et d'argent. Le roman est parfois lent mais l'ensemble est plutôt réussi, d'autant que la plume de Garth Greenwell est très belle.
Very short, finished it in a couple of days. I really enjoyed parts of it, especially the parts about the protagonist's childhood and relationship with his father. The writing is beautiful, but the I feel the subject matter would appeal to few.
I thought this was such a beautiful book on a sentence-by-sentence level. Greenwell is a poet, and you can feel that in his language.
There's a petty reason why this is not going straight into my soul, and that's because Greenwell's protagonist is well observed and well written and has a plausible internal subjectivity, but his life experience is so different from mine and with such a different toy box of issues, repressions, and contradictions that it's hard for me to see myself in him. It's like an incredibly well aimed bullet striking the person just to your left.
Of course, that's not the only purpose of fiction, and I enjoyed the journey anyway.
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