When the narrator starts paying him for home visits, Mitko is available but disengaged, openly using the narrator’s laptop to plan his week with other clients. A public toilet in Sofia is where the narrator’s obsession with Mitko begins – a 23-year-old former builder selling his body after losing his job and home in the financial crash. What Belongs to You – the title is lifted from Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, an ur-text of homoerotic infatuation – is chiefly a narrative of thought and feeling: its elements are combustible but the true conflagration lies in the story’s prehistory. You sense that the book itself (produced after a spell at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop that postdates Greenwell’s period in Bulgaria) is the story’s happy ending, which is part of what makes it troubling. Later – any readerly sophistication in tatters – I found myself wondering what Greenwell might have left out from his own experience in order to maintain the novel’s insistent melancholy. The book's elements are combustible but the true conflagration lies in the story's prehistory
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