This book was provided by Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

There are books that exist as an attempt to recreate reality. They morph, becoming a string of words that become code—still prose—flowing from page to your body. Imbuing themselves into your very essence. As though slotting themselves in your DNA. Leaving you walking around, marked, stamped. Here walks this bitch, she read me. Short of a pulsating tattoo of text that rolls all over you there's no way to see how a book fundamentally changes you.

I received this book from Netgalley back in 2020 and since then I've had no excuse for not reading it. Perhaps I had thought to read the author's previous work, his debut, What Belongs to You. But alas a bitch is broke and it's not available on Libby. The book lingered in my Kindle library. The bare grayscale back always berating me with its silence. I mocked its existence the longer it stayed unread. I have encountered Greenwell's work before in my reason for living—The New Yorker—and I was impressed. I always knew I'd love this book but perhaps some Providence-led intuition led me to leave this book until 2022 when I could fully appreciate how brilliant, masterful and wonderful it is.

The book starts with our narrator, who remains unnamed and even goes as far as referring to the people around him by their initial, going for a meeting with a student in his class, G.. G. arrives late, by the narrator's American standards, and off they go for a discussion in a tea-hued underground cafe with cigarettes and Deep Conversation™️ about poetry and literature. Immediately, you will feel the narrator's otherness. A running theme where he will compare his status as an American, as a gay man, as an old man, as a fat man and whatever other demographic where he doesn't meet the "default". Or where he is an arbitrary minority like a teacher among students.

The narrator being this mirror, this control experiment, creates a perfect sounding board for all the brilliant characters he meets as he winds down his teaching tenure in Sofia, Bulgaria. In this first chapter, Mentor, G. tells him about his unrequited love for his childhood best friend.
I felt lucky, he said, I expected the whole time that I would mess it up, that our friendship would burn out the way my friendships would always burn out... I understood him entirely, and it seemed to me the intimacy he had drawn between us deepened further, becoming a sort of kinship, which I greeted with both welcome and dread.
This book catches you off-guard with the nonchalant way it delivers heartbreak. These daily pains that we walk with, poverty, ended relationships, job rejections, our narrator encounters them and treats them with the same pragmatism, despair and disdain. Pain knows no geography. You can get your heart broken in Paris just as easily as you can in Nairobi. The difference is, in Paris, the lights will distract you. For a moment, the city will be a beacon of art, romance, culture. In Nairobi, you will get robbed.

But I digress, the narrator has sound-ish advice for our unloved lover.
the intensity you feel now will be like a puzzle you can't solve, a puzzle it finally isn't worth your while to solve. I was speaking of myself, of course, of my own experience with love, with overwhelming love that had made me at times such a stranger to myself...
Which of course, G. with all the brashness and ineptitude of youth dismisses,
I don't want to feel it less, he said, I don't want it to stop, I don't want it to seem like it wasn't real. It would be for nothing if that happened, he said, I don't want it to be a dream, I want it to be real, all of it. And who else could I love... who could I love as much? What life could I want except for that life... what other life than that could I bear?
I understood where G. was coming from. Maybe better than most. And for the first time in my life, I didn't argue. there would be loss in loving another.

The story continues with such beats. Chapter 2 is about Gospodar. A Bulgarian word for Master. A man who our narrator dallies with in order to invoke in him feelings of nothingness. An antithesis to the man who broke our narrator's heart, R. In Loving R., he says
Sex had never been joyful for me before, or almost never, it had always been fraught with shame and anxiety and fear, all of which vanished at the sight of his smile, simply vanished, it poured a kind of cleanness over everything we did.
This is perhaps the most poignant part of the book. The one that had me shedding tears on the bus while I listened to Norah Jones. THIS part is the reason why anyone should read this book. Even though our narrator is a remarkable teacher. A talented observer who finds words to articulate feelings we never even knew we felt,
he must have been quiet as he moved the furniture. I caught my breath at it, I felt a weird pressure and heat climb my throat. I felt like my heart would burst, those were the words for it, the hackneyed phrase, and I was grateful for them, they were a container for what I felt, proof of its commonness. I was grateful for that, too, the commonness of my feeling; I felt some stubborn strangeness in me ease, I felt like part of the human race.
And of course other gems like, there was so much pleasure in being a fool, why had I spent so much of my life guarding against it? which of course mean more to me than they would another reader.

There is a lot of commentary on the political struggles in Bulgaria which I can equate to those in my country. Corrupt leaders go brrr. Tale as old as time.

But perhaps the bit that left me the most...unsettled... is a scene in the final chapter, Valediction. In it the narrator and three of his former students go on bar hopping spree. A final toast for their godspodin. From Sofia with love. One of the students, Z. perches his cocktail of a juice box and vodka on a pillar of historic significance.
Z. chose a pillar the right height and sat the carton on top of it, making me suck my breath between my teeth. What, he asked, and I said something about its antiquity, how it was thousands of years old and he was using it as his table. N. laughed. All this time in Bulgaria, he said, and you're still such an American. We have stuff like this everywhere, he said, if we couldn't touch it we couldn't live.
What good is art, if you can't live it?

An interesting read that I'm glad to have discovered. I'll definitely be seeking out more by this author.

This book lived up to the hype. Fresh, exciting, electric. A queer story of love, loss and desire. A shifting narrative which questions borders: territorial, emotional, bodily. I'd definitely recommend this to friends.

“Sex had never been joyful for me before, or almost never, it had always been fraught with shame and anxiety and fear, all of which vanished at the sight of his smile, simply vanished, it poured a kind of cleanness over everything we did.”

Cleanness is a book about an unnamed gay American teacher in Sofia, Bulgaria as he spends a couple of years teaching English. Bulgaria is not a country which is relaxed about homosexuality and neither is the narrator really comfortable with his own sexuality. Shame is a strong theme of the book and the shame only subsides during the bit of the book where the narrator is with his beloved boyfriend R.

The novel is organised in vignettes during different periods of the narrator’s time in Bulgaria and never fully names any of the characters, calling them each by an initial letter. I found this anonymising and time-skipping meant it was difficult to keep track of who was who. There are quite a few sex scenes in the novel, some of which were too graphic and sadomasochistic for me. I did enjoy the descriptions of place and felt that the grey streets of Sofia were well drawn.

Thanks to the author, publisher and NetGalley for providing a review copy in exchange for honest feedback.

<i>“Who knows why we take pleasure in such things, maybe it’s best not to look into it too closely.”</i>

Wow, I was really impressed by this. I came to this book a bit wary of all the hype surrounding it, but I ended up genuinely surprised by how much I enjoyed it. It’s a genuine accomplishment.

The writing reminds of Rachel Cusk and WG Sebald, in the sense that the “plot” is driven by conversations, encounters, and travel. The unnamed first-person narrator, for better or worse, ‘reads’ as a stand-in for the author. He lives in Bulgaria, where he teaches English at a high school. In my favourite chapter, he attends a protest and thinks about the meaning of democracy, and acceptance, and teaching Walt Whitman to his students. He attends a writing workshop in Sozopol. He falls in love with a Portuguese man, and they go on vacation to Bologna and Venice, where they’re affectionate in public and look at paintings hidden away in basements. And, in the novel’s most intense section, he seeks out abusive sex, in which he’s called “fat” and “a woman,” and gets pissed on.

<i>“It’s what I love most about the websites I visit, that you can call out for anything you desire, however aberrant or unlikely, and nearly always there comes an answer; it’s a large world, we’re never as solitary as we think, as unique or unprecedented, what we feel has always always already been felt.”</i>

An important theme of the book to me was shame - the opposite of the ‘cleanness’ of the title- and the dissonance between our public and private selves. Yes, the book is racy, and me being the conservative repressed raised-Catholic that I am, I read the sex passages with my mouth open. They read like erotica, almost.

I thought it was a very brave and risky thing to do - to write so explicitly about graphic sex, move-by-move. It’s the kind of thing that’s easy to criticise (as in "ooooouugggh so self-absorbed; such shock-value") but I DARE you to fucking do it yourself. I also thought it was SO interesting the way the book used the language of porn and sex (i.e. “you want my cock, bad boy” etc.) - a language that we all know and are familiar with. When the narrator tells the stray dog at the end, <i>“You’re filthy, but I love you,”</i> it’s astonishingly moving, and feels like an incredibly satisfying but subtle conclusion. <i>“She was dirty, but what was a little dirt.”</i>

This sounds like such a vague and unhelpful thing to say, but overall the writing in this just felt very true to me, and that’s how I knew that it was special. I like how so much of the book is about the everyday experience of trying to make your way as a lonely, ashamed human in the world. The narrator isn’t likeable or morally perfect. I can see why some people would find this kind of writing solipsistic, or absorbed, or, like, advancing an uneasy narrative about queer lives… but… I just felt like this guy was just writing his truth, man. And I responded to it.

<i>“That’s the worst thing about teaching, that all our actions either have no force at all or have force beyond all intention, and not only our actions but our failures to act, gestures and words held back or unspoken, all we might have done and failed to do; and, more than this, that the consequences echo across years and silence, we can never really know what we’ve done.”</i>

Thanks to Picador/Pan Macmillan for the ARC via NetGalley.

Garth Greenwell’s second novel CLEANNESS is a series of short episodes in the life of an American teacher living and working in Sofia, Bulgaria around the time of the Arab Spring. The majority of the stories focus on the character’s relationships with and to other men who are exploring their sexuality, and one of the longer sections describes in vivid detail the character’s experience of a political protest surging through the centre of the city.

What will really stay with me from this book is Greenwell’s craft in writing about sex. The two sex scenes with strangers were upfront but also intricately detailed, completely without cliche and explorative of the psychology and physiology behind gay men’s pleasure and pain. The extremely gripping episode where the main character meets a hookup who is into BDSM particularly stands out.

I also really connected with the writing about corrosive nature of shame, especially the teacher’s longing for a relationship with a man who struggling deeply with the acceptance of himself due to an incident in his past.

While the author is clearly talented, I personally didn’t like the structure of this book. The book is told through small insights into the main characters life in Bulgaria as a gay man but as each tale was so small it felt like you didn’t really get to know the character or feel attached to their story. It all just felt a little disjointed to read. One small niggle is that I didn’t like the lack of character names, it became a little harder to follow.

Review also posted to Goodreads

Despite the agonizingly edited prose and its melancholic tones, Greenwell's novel is simply just another book about self-hating gay white men trying to figure out a way to love themselves through the lens of their own privilege.

Cleanness is a follow up to Greenwell’s previous book about the unnamed American teacher in Sofia (at least I assume it’s the same protagonist). This is not necessarily an easy read, but a worthwhile one. Cleanness is told through nine loosely connected stories, that are more thematic than driving any narrative destination, and cleverly distracted to effectively act as a mirrored triptych. At times almost shockingly explicit, emotionally raw at times, detached at others, i was left with a sense of loss at the end, reflecting the emotional gap at the centre of the unnamed teacher/.
The sexually explicit nature of some content will put some people off; don’t be. It’s explicit but realistic, and not bad sex award sex for the sake of it. There’s purpose as well as erotic charge and discomfort.
Not for everyone, but rewarding for those that want to explore.

I heard a lot of good things about this author's other novel What Belongs To You and so I requested this on Netgalley because I was curious to see for myself what the fuss was about.

There is no doubt that the writing is strong and evocative. Told in first person and long sentences with a ruminative feel it does feel like you're inside the mind of someone's actual lived experience. This is first person fiction of the highest order, when the sleight of hand is so strong that you feel like it can't be fiction.

However, I'm not sure I liked this very much. The disturbing power dynamics and harsh sexual interactions in the second section made me really uncomfortable, and I don't think that response was due to the homosexual nature I just found it hard to read how vulnerable he was, how far out of control it got and his own sense of horror and shame.

Every sentence does feel loaded with meaning, but it felt like meaning I didn't understand and without a solid knowledge of Bulgarian history or even its present day I didn't get as much out of this as I hoped. That said, every book has its perfect reader and I feel like it's me and not the book at fault here.

Thanks to netgalley and the publisher for a copy in exchange for an honest review.

Cleanness is a novel of interconnected stories about an American teacher in Sofia, as he reflects on the past, on his romance with a younger man, and his sense of self and location in relation to Bulgaria, desire, and sex. The novel has three sections, and separate stories within those sections, which tell different snippets of the protagonist's time in Sofia (who is presumably the same protagonist as Greenwell's previous novel What Belongs to You). The middle section is about his love for R., a Portuguese college student on exchange in Bulgaria, and how their romance plays out, and it is this section that feels like a kind of heart to the novel as the stories are more obviously connected.

The atmosphere and reflection in the book feel similar to What Belongs to You, which I remember enjoying but don't remember a huge amount about otherwise, and the different stories really build up a sense of the protagonist's time there. The exploration of intimacy, sex and desire and love as well as other tiny moments, seems like the point of the book, and the protagonist's sometimes conflicted thoughts are interesting, though at times the format leaves you wishing there could be more of a sense of continuity. The book is sometimes lingering and sometimes intense, suiting the depiction of sex and desire, but the different stories made it feel too stilted at times which made it hard to engage with. Maybe I just came into it expecting too much, and the middle section was particularly good, but I don't think it lived up to what I expected.

I liked what this did as it was interestingly written and explored the topic well. The main character was compelling and I was engaged throughout the whole story. The chapters and the way it was spilt was interesting and each chapter had a clear voice and it was obvious what the aim of it was going to be.

Cleanness is a stunning collection of stories following an American teacher living in Sofia detailing his sex life, relationship with his students and life in Bulgaria. The stories come together to form a novel of sorts but it is lacking a continuing plot tying the stories together, however this doesn’t matter as the prose is exquisite.
Greenwell writes about sex with a rare intelligence which is at once compelling, thought-provoking and erotic. Each story packs a punch in their own way. Some are intense and raw and graphic while some are slow and more understated. Each story is captivating and will leave you dazzled whether it is a story about BDSM hook ups or the fascinating insights into modern Bulgaria and life as an expat.
A stunning read, thank you to NetGalley and Picador for the copy.

Greenwell's writing is lucid and as transparent as his title as these mini narratives explore how love is entangled with issues of power, pain, shame, vulnerability. The sex is frequently explicit, even brutal, but it can be tender, too, as when the narrator writes of his love of R., and his loss when their affair comes apart. Set in Sofia, there's a kind of melancholy alienation about the stories reflected in the different languages and the shifting roles and identities of the narrator. Cleanliness, ultimately, seems to be associated with love washing over the acts of the body - yet the narrator can't help from pursuing transactional sex, shifting between roles of dominance and submission. Raw and intense, this feels utterly contemporary.