Garth Greenwell

‘This is an exceptional work of fiction, which places Greenwell among the very best contemporary novelists’ The i Bulgaria’s capital, Sofia, stirs with hope and impending upheaval. Soviet buildings crumble, unrelenting winds lash the city, political protesters flood the streets with song. Amid this disquiet, a young American teacher prepares to leave the place he’s come to call home. In a reflective mood, heightened by his imminent departure, he grapples with the intimate encounters that have marked his years abroad, each revealing startling insights about what it means to seek connection: with those we love, with the places we inhabit and with ourselves. Written in precise, elegant prose, Cleanness is an almost unbearably poignant book about a man whose life, like so many, has been transformed by the discovery and loss of love. Chosen as a book of the year in the New Yorker, Daily Telegraph, Observer, New York Times, BBC, TIME and Irish Times. A New York Times Notable Book of 2020. Longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize.

Cleanness

Kristina Bonitz

I thought I saw between him and another boy in my class, the intensity with which G. sought him out and the privacy he drew about them. It was familiar to me, that intensity, a story

But that conversation was like a cloth already wrung dry, and soon we were sitting in silence. 

their edges were rubbed smooth by too much looking, there was nothing for my attention to catch on in them. 

They could make a whole life, I thought, surprised to think it, these moments that filled me up with sweetness, that had changed the texture of existence for me. 

It was a habit of mine, to rush toward an ending once I thought I could see it, as if the fact of loss were easier to bear than the chance of it.

. . . at least I had found books that, even if they were always tragic, offered a certain beauty as compensation.

. . . in time, you’ll look at [these feelings] from far away. . . as if they were felt by somebody else, or felt in a dream. . . it’s precisely like waking from a dream, and like a self in a dream, the self that feels this will be incomprehensible to you. . . 

. . . as if there were something in me unreachable in my own language, something I could reach only with that blunter instrument by which I too was made a blunter instrument. . . 

I was struck again by his beauty, which was offhand and accidental, with his disheveled hair and ruffled clothes, a beauty stripped of self-regard. Even though it was familiar to me I felt it as a kind of physical force. . .

. . . however things turned out they would have consequence, and I was both frightened by this and gave myself over to it. . .

Cleanness quotes

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