What belongs to you a novel6/27/2023 ![]() Through his eyes we see the object of his desire, Mitko B., a “thin but broad-shouldered” hustler with a “jagged tooth” and a smell of “alcohol that emanated not so much from his breath as from his clothes and hair.” This description is spread across one page, each line followed by the narrator’s interpretation of that line, creating a work that is bookended by prolonged sessions of self-restraint that unravels in the in-between. Set almost entirely in Sofia, Bulgaria, Greenwell’s relative sliver of a novel plants us in the head of its unnamed American narrator, a gay man who teaches English to kids who in any other country would be called privileged. ![]() ![]() And now that backlash has arrived as a novel, in the form of Garth Greenwell’s What Belongs to You, a book about a gay love so utterly specific and self-aware that it might as well be viewed through an inverted microscope. The problem, if you can call it that, came months after the initially flurry of praise, when the book experienced a kind of backlash to that excess. Yanagihara filtered trauma through literary excess and so found a home with urbanites and literati who claimed that trauma and excess as their own, catapulting her book into best-seller status and landing it on many, many awards shortlists. ![]() ![]() Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life was the surprise smash of 2015, its stark orgasmic cover unfolding into 700-plus pages of melodramatic gay heartbreak and daydream art-career success. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |