What Belongs to You

2016年國家圖書獎入圍作品、《紐約時報》編輯選書，194頁精簡小書，卻道盡人性最充滿慾望的一面。

　　在一個異常溫暖的秋日，一位美國教師走進保加利亞索非亞國家文化宮（National Palace of Culture）的公共廁所。在那裡他遇見Mitko，一個充滿魅力的年輕騙子，並與他發生關係。被飢渴、孤獨與冒險的心情吸引，他一再回到Mitko身邊，並發現自己陷入這段關係當中，但他也很清楚Mitko只不過將他當作金主而已。

　　正當他掙扎與Mitko的關係之際，他被迫要面對自已的過去，那個他在南方童年世界裡的悲慘回憶，但與此同時，他卻也發現他來到的這個國家，與他那不堪回首的記憶竟是那麼相似……。

　　《What Belongs to You》是一本關於忘卻理性，服從自己的心與性慾的故事，這故事探討慾望，卻也揭示最終只有你自己能為自己的幸福與滿足負責這項真理。(文/博客來編譯)

　　On an unseasonably warm autumn day, an American teacher enters a public bathroom beneath Sofia’s National Palace of Culture. There he meets Mitko, a charismatic young hustler, and pays him for sex. He returns to Mitko again and again over the next few months, drawn by hunger and loneliness and risk, and finds himself ensnared in a relationship in which lust leads to mutual predation, and tenderness can transform into violence. As he struggles to reconcile his longing with the anguish it creates, he’s forced to grapple with his own fraught history, the world of his southern childhood where to be queer was to be a pariah. There are unnerving similarities between his past and the foreign country he finds himself in, a country whose geography and griefs he discovers as he learns more of Mitko’s own narrative, his private history of illness, exploitation, and want.

　　What Belongs to You is a stunning debut novel of desire and its consequences. With lyric intensity and startling eroticism, Garth Greenwell has created an indelible story about the ways in which our pasts and cultures, our scars and shames can shape who we are and determine how we love.

作者簡介

　　GARTH GREENWELL is the author of Mitko, which won the 2010 Miami University Press Novella Prize and was a finalist for the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction and a Lambda Award. A native of Louisville, Kentucky, he holds graduate degrees from Harvard University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was an Arts Fellow in fiction.