In one of the book forums I follow on Facebook, someone suggested Garth Greenwell's What Belongs to You. It sounded interesting, the library had a copy, so I gave it a shot. I'm kind of happy it came from the library, because I can't imagine actually paying money for it.
The book, written in first person and masquerading a a memoir, at its most basic level is the story of a teacher at an English School in Sofia, Bulgaria, and the relationship between the narrator and a male prostitute he meets in a bathroom in the National Palace of Culture. Mitko, the prostititute, seems to enjoy tempting and teasing the narrator, hitting him up for money here and there and occasionally satisfying the narrator's physical needs. That's it. Other than giving the narrator syphilis, which he dutifully passes on to his Portuguese boyfriend, Mitko has no real purpose. Nor does the narrator.
We gets and pieces of our narrator's upbringing, including a request from his father that he come home so he can see him before he, the father, dies. This leads to a two page reflection on Dad disowning the narrator after the narrator comes out. Most of the reflection deals with narrator realizing he's gay after watching his male friend make out with a woman. We never do find out if he went to say his goodbyes to his father.
Towards the end, his mother visits, and we listen to him whine for several pages about how adults can't cuddle up with a parent the way a child can. When we last see Mitko a few pages later, Mitko's kidneys are failing, so he's given money for food and train passage to his mother. Our narrator, despite his desire, rejects Mitko's final offer of sexual gratification, which at a guess was supposed to be a symbol of acceptance of self, but honestly, having heard about pus discharge, jaundice, and other such fun things about Mitko a few paragraphs ago, this falls short.
Based on what others have said, I guess this is supposed to be about sublimating desire and passion and instead embracing comfort, but that gets lost amongst the purple prose, the whining, and the dangling plot lines. I'm assuming that the constant harping about how Bulgaria is dying is a metaphor for the narrator's inner death, but that falls flat as well.
Really, about the only two things I enjoyed were the setting (I have a coworker who was raised in Bulgaria, so it made for some fun conversations), and a brief discussion on coming out during the height of the AIDS epidemic and how it was assumed that your life progression was sex, infection death, with no stops in between. That isn't enough to justify a glowing review of what really amounts to an aimless jaunt of a letter to an adult magazine discussing loving a hooker but not even giving any spicy details about the relationship.
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