![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() He spoke easily and at length about growing up gay in Kentucky, erotic freedom, and the many faces of desire. I met with Greenwell last November after eagerly reading an early copy of the novel. The second section comprises a single unbroken paragraph that reflects back to the narrator’s childhood, and the third returns to his troubled relationship with Mitko. It follows the young American teacher, new to Bulgaria, as he engages Mitko for sex in the bathrooms under Sofia’s National Palace of Culture. The first section is a revised version of a novella, Mitko, which won the Miami University Press Novella Prize in 2011 and marked Greenwell’s first foray into fiction. Greenwell’s debut novel, What Belongs to You, out today, dilates those same concerns: over three sections, the book’s unnamed narrator plumbs the feelings of exploitation, loneliness, and overwhelming desire that are produced by his complicated, compulsive affair with a bewitching male prostitute named Mitko. Greenwell, also a poet, is exacting in the language he uses to describe the encounter the result is an intimate and intense intermingling of desire and trepidation. Garth Greenwell’s “ Gospodar,” which appeared in our Summer 2014 issue, is a slow-simmering story of unease, humiliation, and eroticism-it concerns a man’s experience with sadomasochistic sex in Sofia, Bulgaria. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |