What Belongs to You

Review

As soon as I finished Small Rain, or at least once I snapped out of the adoring daze in which it left me, I ordered copies of Greenwell’s other books, this along with Cleanness. The three share a loose continuity, with (apparently) the same unnamed narrator. This book following him through a few years spent in Bulgaria, as he entwines with and parts from Mitko.

Greenwell’s prose is as lovely here as in Small Rain, and I sometimes re-read sentences just to soak in them. Elements feel so tangible and real that they risk implanting ‘false’ memories, or drawing out those that share kinship in your own life, reflecting and refracting off these written words. Such was the flash to our protagonist’s history with his father on page 72:

That as the end of care, he thrust me away without a thought for the slickness of the tiles; and when I looked at his face, which was twisted in disgust, it was as if I saw his true face, his authentic face, not the learned face of fatherhood. He covered himself quickly and left the room, saying nothing, but his look entered me and settled there and has never left, it rooted beneath memory and became my understanding of myself, my understanding and expectation.

On some passages, I put the book down because I felt myself sliding into memories, reliving them, as I am so wont to do. Sometimes I struggle to read, because a word or phrase will scream off the page in someone else’s voice, voices I miss terribly, and I will get lost in memories of them as they ravel and unravel. I was surprised to find this phenomena captured so well in Greenwell’s writing as our protagonist relives aspects of his history. First love, the crushing humiliation that often accompanies love in-general. Abandonment tossed down so carelessly at a child that he picks up and wears as self-hatred for decades.

Then there are Greenwell’s small phrases that so well capture the feeling of infatuation. Remembering conversations with his first ‘crush,’ our protagonist describes them as “the primary fact of our lives.” Decades later with Mitko, as our lead struggles with infatuation and alienation from him, he describes little safeguards he adopts:

These were measures against myself, really, I wanted to make it more difficult for me to find him in a spasm of remorse; and though I thought of him often, though he appeared in dreams from which I woke more excited than I was by anything in my waking life, I didn’t regret what I had done. I had missed him, but more than missing him I had been relieved that he was gone.

The only part of this I can’t relate to is the last clause of the last sentence. I’ve never felt such relief, and I wonder if some part of me is damaged for that. The modern equivalents though—deleting apps, blocking accounts, attempting to program your behavior in such a way as to minimize risk of exposure. These I understand. It’s not the other person that causes damage, it’s oneself. At least, that’s how it is for me. As our protagonist knows, some of us can’t be trusted with our whims and emotions and longings. Love can be as corrosive as it can be strengthening.

About three-quarters of the way through this book, I realized I had found an author that I will likely read everything he publishes. Aside from Annie Ernaux, I’m not sure I’ve had this experience with a living author. Certainly not one that is so young. Possibly this reveals how under-read I am, at least as far as contemporary writing goes. Nonetheless, I loved this book and I expect to love Cleanness when I read it in the coming weeks.

Notes

Bold mine unless otherwise noted.

• p33 - [Referring to seeds he is seeing, and a Whitman poem earlier mentioned:] What were those seeds if not the wind’s soft-tickling genitals, the world’s procreant urge, and I realized I had always read them poorly, the lines I had failed to understand; they weren’t exaggerated at all, they were exact, and for a moment I understood his desire to be naked before the world, his madness, as he says, to be in contact with it. I even felt something of that desire myself, though it was nothing like madness for me, 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.
• p36 - Sudba, Mitko said, fate, the single word serving to dismiss at a stroke all choice and consequence. In Varna there were no jobs, he said, and in Sofia, what jobs there were were shut off to him, since he had no address he could give to employers, and no way to get an address without work.
• p44 - I lay back from him then, I lay next to him thinking, as I had had cause to think before, of how helpless desire is outside its little theater of heat, how ridiculous it becomes the moment it isn’t welcomed, even if that welcome is contrived.
• p68 - It was as though [narrator’s father] had filed them by some logic of progression, the images growing ever more obscene and upsetting, little pageants of submission and need. It never occurred to her to go to [narrator’s sister] mother with what she had found, she said; she had already been enlisted in her parents’ battles, subjected to the cruelty of sparring adults in relation to their children, a cruelty that reduces those children to tools or weapons, to weapons of a particularly brutal kind.
• p72 - That as the end of care, he thrust me away without a thought for the slickness of the tiles; and when I looked at his face, which was twisted in disgust, it was as if I saw his true face, his authentic face, not the learned face of fatherhood. He covered himself quickly and left the room, saying nothing, but his look entered me and settled there and has never left, it rooted beneath memory and became my understanding of myself, my understanding and expectation.
• p75 - It would be months before we met in person, and in those months our conversations grew longer and more frequent, until they became, I think for both of us, the primary fact of our lives. . .
• p102 - [A horse] wasn’t tied up, I saw, it could have wandered off anytime it chose; but there was nowhere for it to go, of course, and the cart I supposed was heavy, and there was something however meager to be had there where it stood.
• p106 -These were measures against myself, really, I wanted to make it more difficult for me to find him in a spasm of remorse; and though I thought of him often, though he appeared in dreams from which I woke more excited than I was by anything in my waking life, I didn’t regret what I had done. I had missed him, but more than missing him I had been relieved that he was gone.
• p139 - It was ridiculous to care so much, I knew, it was just a fly, why should it matter; but it did matter, at least while I watched it. That’s all care is, I thought, it’s just looking at a thing long enough, why should it be a question of scale? This seemed like a hopeful thought at first, but then it’s hard to look at things, or to look at them truly, and we can’t look at many at once, and it’s so easy to look away.
• p145 - I thought of R. . . . I hated that I wasn’t with him, that there was no one he could ask to go in my place, that he was there because of me. I worried it would make him regret having met me at all; I wondered if I thought it should.
  • TB: “I worried that it would make him regret having me me at all” — a constant question.
• p176 - . . .he began to repeat a single phrase, which even though it was short I didn’t catch at first, both because his speech was slurred and because i was so odd, a statement of counterfact, Men me nyama, he said, the three words again and again, men me nyama, men me nyama, I’m gone, it means, or I’m not here, literally there’s no me, an odd construction I can’t quite make work in English. . . . Dnes sum tuk, he said, a utre men me nyama, today I’m here, tomorrow I’m gone, and then he took up his weird chant again.