The transaction of desire
I recently read, almost in an entire sitting, which is rare for me, Garth Greenwell's new book, Mitko. The slim, elegantly written and psychologically complex narrative tells of an American living in Sofia, Bulgaria who meets a young man he pays for sex. The book feels like one or two long, undulating paragraphs, a movement I relished as it enabled me to fall into the waves of Greenwell's luxuriously rich syntax and to enjoy his poetic sensibility as a prose stylist. The content of the book is equally captivating, a simple but moving story of the narrator's relationship to this enigmatic Mitko. As his desire and need grow, the relationship becomes a kind of crucible of internal conflicts, which ultimately prompts a dramatic conclusion that leaves the reader wondering if catharsis is really possible when it comes to unrequited love.
I thought I'd share a wonderful passage I enjoyed. As I sat down, I just kept on typing. Hope you enjoy!
"My fatigue had become a kind of agitation now, I felt antsy, on edge, opening and closing the book still lying unread on my lap. I hadn't found in it what I wanted, as I say, what I found in it before, the recovery of something like nobility from the mawkishness and share of desire, the sense that sex, even the most usually devalued—stray meetings in dark rooms or the shadowy commerce of my own evening—burned with genuine luminosity, rubbing up against the realm of the ideal, ready a the slightest provocation to be transfigured, to become, as sex is always wont to do, metaphysics."
"…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 and reflected, even if that reflection is contrived. And also how lonely, what a kind of absolute isolation and exclusion, even as Mitko was right next to me, naked now and stretched out beside me with his arms behind his head, granting me an unrestricted access that did nothing to assuage my sense of the lack of him, even as it was his warmth next to me that I strove to feel as I brought myself off."
"Nor was it the first time he caught [my own false tones, my search for the appropriate pitch], and indeed it was the key of my own peculiar music, this ambivalence that spurs me first to one course of action and then to another, a process of expansion and contraction, so that my entire life, it sometimes seems to me, resembles nothing so much as a kind of grotesquely laboring lung."
