What Belongs to You

Une histoire poignante, celle d'un professeur américain installé en Bulgarie après avoir fui le Sud américain profond et son père homophobe. A Sofia, il rencontre un jeune prostitué bulgare avec lequel il va nouer une relation faite de désir et d'argent. Le roman est parfois lent mais l'ensemble est plutôt réussi, d'autant que la plume de Garth Greenwell est très belle.

Obicham te.

Very short, finished it in a couple of days. I really enjoyed parts of it, especially the parts about the protagonist's childhood and relationship with his father. The writing is beautiful, but the I feel the subject matter would appeal to few.

Meh. Didn't live up to the hype at all for me, not even close.

I thought this was such a beautiful book on a sentence-by-sentence level. Greenwell is a poet, and you can feel that in his language.

There's a petty reason why this is not going straight into my soul, and that's because Greenwell's protagonist is well observed and well written and has a plausible internal subjectivity, but his life experience is so different from mine and with such a different toy box of issues, repressions, and contradictions that it's hard for me to see myself in him. It's like an incredibly well aimed bullet striking the person just to your left.

Of course, that's not the only purpose of fiction, and I enjoyed the journey anyway.