Longlisted for the Prix Sade 2021 Longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize Longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize A New York Times Notable Book of 2020 A New York Times Critics Top Ten Book of the Year Named a Best Book of the Year by over 30 Publications, including The New Yorker, TIME, The Washington Post, Entertainment Weekly, NPR, and the BBC In the highly anticipated follow-up to his … Entertainment Weekly, NPR, and the BBC
In the highly anticipated follow-up to his beloved debut, What Belongs to You, Garth Greenwell deepens his exploration of foreignness, obligation, and desire
Sofia, Bulgaria, a landlocked city in southern Europe, stirs with hope and impending upheaval. Soviet buildings crumble, wind scatters sand from the far south, and political protesters flood the streets with song.
In this atmosphere of disquiet, an American teacher navigates a life transformed by the discovery and loss of love. As he prepares to leave the place he’s come to call home, he grapples with the intimate encounters that have marked his years abroad, each bearing uncanny reminders of his past. A queer student’s confession recalls his own first love, a stranger’s seduction devolves into paternal sadism, and a romance with another foreigner opens, and heals, old wounds. Each echo reveals startling insights about what it means to seek connection: with those we love, with the places we inhabit, and with our own fugitive selves.
Cleanness revisits and expands the world of Garth Greenwell’s beloved debut, What Belongs to You, declared “an instant classic” by The New York Times Book Review. In exacting, elegant prose, he transcribes the strange dialects of desire, cementing his stature as one of our most vital living writers.
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In Cleanness, I found an end to a loneliness I didn’t know ― until now ― how to describe. Greenwell maps the worlds our language walls off ― sex, love, shame and friendship, the foreign and the familiar ― and finds the sublime. There are visceral shocks like I’ve never encountered in print, and they delighted me, again and again. With each plunge we take beneath the surface of life, lost and new worlds appear. This could only be the work of a master.
Cleanness is stunning, provocatively revelatory and atmospherically profound. Here is love and sex as art, as pulse, as truth.
If Henry James were alive in this strange century, if Thomas Mann had been allowed to write raw sex, if Virginia Woolf had slummed it more, if Proust had been born in Kentucky, if they all commingled their blood and brains, we might get something like Garth Greenwell. Cleanness lives between Europe and America, between novel and story, between fiction and the self. It is indescribable, and it is genius.
I don’t know how Garth Greenwell writes such delicate, profane fiction. These stories are grace and salt, tenderness and shadow. Reading this book made me want to sit with my emotions and desires; it made me want to be a better writer.
Beautifully written…and strangely enticing story. There are some graphical sex scenes so please be aware if that bothers you. But that is part of the charm…utter starkness.
An exquisite story collection that reads like a novel. At its core, the story of a gay American teacher in Bulgaria, who yearns for the heart of a young man from Lisboa. A psychological deep dive into power dynamics, the essence of sexual desire, the love, the betrayals. Exquisite prose:”But none of this was right, I rejected the phrases even as they formed, not just because they were objectionable in themselves but because none of them answered his real fear, which was true, I thought: that we can never be sure of what we want, I mean of the authenticity of it, of its purity in relation to ourselves.”
Cleanness is a novel of such vivid sensuality that you can almost taste it, and the book’s trio of (I can think of no other term) sex arias are almost harrowingly erotic. But just as memorable are the author’s minute observations. There is magic in seeing the world through Greenwell’s eyes.
Garth Greenwell writes with remarkable power, vulnerability and an operatic beauty. Such is the compelling journey of the characters of this book that we come to a new understanding of the body, loneliness, risk, desire and even anguish, but also a tenderness, a hard-won grace that can and does transform. What he leaves us with is an absolute truth―love is what drives us all towards light, towards any kind of redemption, but we must earn it, we must give all to it.
An unbearably wonderful, eloquently sexual, thoughtful, emotional, delight of a novel ― Garth Greenwell writes like no one else.
Garth Greenwell, whose first book is a masterpiece, amazingly has written a second book that is also a masterpiece. The great enterprise that Joyce and Lawrence began ― to write with utter literal candor about sex, grounding one’s moral life and philosophical insight in what that candor reveals about us ― finds fulfillment, a late apotheosis, in Greenwell’s work. Cleanness is the act of a master.
So rarely do words make comprehensible the inevitability and confusion of desire as Garth Greenwell’s writing does. His sensibility is akin to James Baldwin’s, and he observes the world with eyes like those of Tolstoy. With shimmering prose and undiluted intensity, Cleanness captures the indefinableness of pain and intimacy, love and alienation, vulnerability and sustainability.
Cleanness reaches into the relationship between masculinity and violence with more depth than any book I’ve read in a very long time, and it does it by elaborating both the tender and brutal means that men who try to love other men employ to survive the violence they inherited and the violence they still possess. It is, in the best sense, a disturbing book for the simple reason that it speaks the truth.
Garth Greenwell is an intensely beautiful and gorgeous writer. I can think of no contemporary author who brings as much reality and honesty to the description of sex ― locating in it the sublime, as well as our deepest degradation, sweetness, confusion, and rage. Most American literature seems neutered by comparison. His perfect noticing extends to the way we experience love and loneliness, the feeling of exile, and the eternal search for home.
Cleanness is an impressive book: moving, radical, both beautiful and violent, unexpected. Garth Greenwell is a major writer, and his writing provides us tools to affirm ourselves, to exist ― to fight.