He is an addiction, one that the narrator needs to quit cold turkey, but even when a separation eventually occurs, it seems clear it would take little for him to fall off the wagon in search of a fresh fix. Mitko, who is 23, occasionally comes across like a sulky teenager, addicted to internet chat rooms, constantly demanding and selfish, and prone to tantrums, but the depiction of his sexuality is so vivid and potent that the reader cannot fail to appreciate why the narrator is so in thrall to him.
The transaction is the beginning of an ongoing relationship between the two that veers from loving to manipulative to threatening, depending on the mood of the unpredictable Mitko, who remains firmly in control of his clients, cognisant of the power he holds over them and capable of squeezing every penny – or leva – from them whenever he is in financial distress. “It was astonishing to me that any number of these soiled bills could make that body available, that after the simplest of exchanges I could reach out for it and find it in my grasp.” It’s a powerful and at times startling opening, wherein the narrator pays for casual sex with a hustler in the bathroom of the National Palace of Culture and seems both overwhelmed and turned on by the young man’s availability. The novel is divided into three sections, Mitko, A Grave and Pox, the first of which has been adapted from a novella Greenwell published a few years ago.
It’s the kind of information that might have excited the unnamed narrator of Garth Greenwell’s debut novel, a gay American teaching in Sofia whose sexuality has estranged him from both the land of his birth and his father but whose compulsive desires conspire to bring as much pain as pleasure into his life. “Colin Farrell,” he said, putting his hands to his face as he tried to contain his excitement, “sexy, sexy man. After I checked in to my hotel a young bellboy escorted me to my room and informed me Colin Farrell had been sleeping in the bed that would now be mine for the past few nights.
A few years ago I was invited to Sofia, in Bulgaria, to give a reading.
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