Can a sentimental story be built from a sexual counterpart that is as sordid as it is unexpected?
That is the question that sprinkles since you start reading this novel and that finally serves perfectly the cause of the fundamental story that weaves together the plot, and that ends up leading us through fragility, compassion, unhappiness ...
Because what happens in that furtive encounter of sexual venting at an urgent price is that the literature professor, alter ego of the author, at least in terms of dedication to teaching in the city of Sofia, feels the magnetism of his own identity in the dark reflection of a look.
It may be difficult to explain it, but the point is that in Mitko, the young prostitute with whom the narrator recounts his encounter in the first person, exercises the magnetism of intuition. In Mitko our protagonist finds a reflection of himself, of his past in the deepest United States, of the same homophobic contempt for one or the other side of such distant worlds.
The novel is structured from this sexual encounter in three parts that end up composing an emotional framework about the irrepressible desire, the loss of someone who has always been despised, the attraction between those who on some occasion have been separated or repudiated by their condition.
Around Mitko and that untimely meeting in some bathrooms of the National Palace of Culture of Sofia pivots a novel that brings us closer to prejudice from the side of the one who suffers them, tracing a life rocked by destiny given to its inalienable desire, for the decisions that try to separate the teacher from temptation, due to less anticipated consequences ...
Sofia or some remote city in the United States that the author almost prefers better to forget because therein lies the paternal conflict, detachment, hatred and anger.
The problem is that the magneto of doom ends up acting with unusual force and you never know what to expect if you succumb to it. An author like Garth Greenwell, with his marked poetic roots, bursts in with a shocking or stark lyricism, cruel or so tender that it seems to hurt with every touch.
You can now buy the novel What Belongs to You, Garth Greenwell's acclaimed debut feature, here: