Garth Greenwell

What Belongs to You: A Novel

Notify me when the book’s added
To read this book, upload an EPUB or FB2 file to Bookmate. How do I upload a book?
A haunting novel of erotic obsession by a major new talent
On an unseasonably warm autumn day, an American teacher enters a public bathroom beneath Sofia’s National Palace of Culture. There he meets Mitko, a charismatic young hustler, and pays him for sex. He returns to Mitko again and again over the next few months, drawn by hunger and loneliness and risk, and finds himself ensnared in a relationship in which lust leads to mutual predation, and tenderness can transform into violence. As he struggles to reconcile his longing with the anguish it creates, he’s forced to grapple with his own fraught history, the world of his southern childhood where to be queer was to be a pariah. There are unnerving similarities between his past and the foreign country he finds himself in, a country whose geography and griefs he discovers as he learns more of Mitko’s own narrative, his private history of illness, exploitation, and want.
What Belongs to You is a stunning debut novel of desire and its consequences. With lyric intensity and startling eroticism, Garth Greenwell has created an indelible story about the ways in which our pasts and cultures, our scars and shames can shape who we are and determine how we love.
**
This book is currently unavailable
220 printed pages
Have you already read it? How did you like it?
👍👎

Impressions

  • Farahshared an impression5 years ago
    🙈Lost On Me

Quotes

  • Dhespina Pecinihas quoted3 years ago
    Love isn’t just a matter of looking at someone, I think now, but also of looking with them, of facing what they face, and sometimes I wonder whether there’s anyone I could stand with and watch what I wouldn’t watch with Mitko, whether with my mother, say, or with R.; it’s a terrible thing to doubt about oneself but I do doubt it.
  • Dhespina Pecinihas quoted3 years ago
    Making poems was a way of loving things, I had always thought, of preserving them, of living moments twice; or more than that, it was a way of living more fully, of bestowing on experience a richer meaning. But that wasn’t what it felt like when I looked back at the boy, wanting a last glimpse of him; it felt like a loss. Whatever I could make of him would diminish him, and I wondered whether I wasn’t really turning my back on things in making them into poems, whether instead of preserving the world I was taking refuge from it. The doors opened, the line began to move, and I saw that the boy was already clambering into the seats we had left, claiming a new space as his own.
  • Dhespina Pecinihas quoted3 years ago
    Maybe they were a mistake, my years in this country, maybe the illness I had caught was just a confirmation of it. What had I done but extend my rootlessness, the series of false starts that became more difficult to defend as I got older? I think I hoped I would feel new in a new country, but I wasn’t new here, and if there was comfort in the idea that my habitual unease had a cause, that if I was ill-fitted to the place there was good reason, it was a false comfort, a way of running away from real remedy. But then I didn’t truly believe there was a remedy, I thought as I stepped down from the platform into the snow, walking back to the boulevard, and how could I regret the choices that had brought me, by whatever path, to R., any more than I could regret those that had led to Mitko and to moments that flared in my memory, that I knew I would cherish whatever their consequences.

On the bookshelves

fb2epub
Drag & drop your files (not more than 5 at once)