Author: Garth Greenwell
Publisher: Picador
ISBN:
978-14472-8051-4
Genre: LGBT, Literary Fiction
Pages: 194
Source: Flipkart Review Program
Rating: 5/5
I hardly bothered to hide; I’ve never been good at concealing anything, the whole bent of my nature is toward confession.
INTRO
Some books take you deep inside the
character and leave you there with the resonated emotions. You don’t care of
the phases running into the story, you just feel that word and then next word.
In my life lived almost always beneath the pitch of poetry, a life of
inhibition and missed chances, perhaps, but also a bearable life, a life that
to some extent I had chosen and continued to choose.
I must say when I started this book I was little bit curious cause it comes under LGBT (Homosexuals) section but can you identify the gender of love, the desire that a human can sense, the obsession? Love is state, and I was captivated the author brilliantly created a whole structure around just two characters, an incantation that captured readers till the end.
STRUCTURE
Basically, there is nothing supernatural
thing as far as plot is concern. Story set in Bulgaria and starts with a
nameless narrator, an American professor meets with a young hustler and pays
him for sex. Story should have ended with that point if narrator would have
buried his infatuation towards that guy, Mitko.
He returns to that specific guy Mitko over and over, those encounter lead him that level where he begins feel a bit jealousy after watching Mitko with someone else. Mitko’s goal was clear; he does all this for money.
I asked Mitko why then he chose to live as he did. I knew the question was
naïve, or not even that; it was unfair, it presumed a freedom of choice that
implied a judgment I had no business making, Sudba Mitko said, fate, the single
word serving to dismiss at a stroke all choice and consequence
Soon narrator realize this intensity which he might be a mere foolishness, the eagerness to know a stranger, he cut all bonds to the MItko,
Meanwhile, he remembers all his past memories with his father, the non-acceptance, leaving home, relation with his mother, the last conversation with his father was so, heart storming, I stuck there and felt a kind of hollowness inside.
You disgust me, he said, do you know that, you disgust me, how could you be
my son? As I listened to him say these things it was as though even as I laid
claim to myself I found there was nothing to claim, nothing or next to nothing,
as though I were dissolving and my tears were the outward sign of that
dissolution. He was still speaking, there were still things he wanted to say,
but I hung the phone back on the wall, holding it there a moment as if to
clutch at something, as my mother crossed the room and put her hand on my back
At the end of novel, a disease takes part into it, and how the connection between Mitko as well as narrator shape accordingly.
Actually “What Belongs to You” is an exploration of human bonding, the psyche of person who wanted to be in love, the tenderness he sensed and the fear of losing that feeling.
I have to mention here the narration of the author was fascinating, certain observations left me awestruck. How come author lyrically woven his language, the way he described the delicacy of life. I was even confused and questioned myself “Am I reading a fiction or memoir?” and with this thought Author wins the heart.
He had always been alone, I thought, gazing at a world in which he had never
found a place and that was now almost perfectly indifferent to him; he was
incapable even of disturbing it, of making a sound it could be bothered to hear.
So, if you take people as they are, if you love them for what they are, if you have enough guts to fathom the reality of love. You are right person to read this beautifully crafted book.
ABOUT AUTHOR
A native of Louisville, Kentucky, he holds graduate degrees from Harvard University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was an Arts Fellow.
His short fiction has appeared inThe Paris Review and A Public Space. What Belongs to You is his first novel.
BUY ONLINE: What Belongs To You (English)