Cleanness by Garth Greenwell

Thursday, Sept. 29, 2022--San Antonio

Cleanness by Garth Greenwell is a novel that consists of parts that are like short stories regarding different points in the life of an American man teaching literature at the American College in Sofia, Bulgaria.  (In Europe a "college" is the equivalent of high school in the USA--the top grades before going off to study in university with the students being in their late teens.)  The main character has gone there because it is difficult to get a job teaching literature in the USA, and he has been given this chance in Sofia because it is mainly students who want to study in English so they can get admitted to top universities in Europe or the USA when they graduate.  He is loved by his students and he is attracted to some of them, but he is careful not to have any kind of personal relationship with them until after they have gone to university.  He is attracted to rough sex (BDSM) which is the topic of two parts of the book, but he learns at one point that a relationship based on love and tenderness is better and more desirable.  However, he cannot easily have a relationship in Sofia because he is gay and cannot openly show or declare his feelings without being in danger.  His one love develops when there is an intern who has come to the school for a semester as a part of his graduate studies at a Portuguese university.  But it is hard to maintain the relationship after the semester is over and he cannot find a job in Portugal or elsewhere so that they can be together and his partner cannot find a job in Sofia.  The stories are very well written; I found myself amazed at the way the words made me feel and how reading them gave me pleasure.  Except, I found the two stories of BDSM encounters were too detailed and too long; I almost quit the book after the first one, and I lost interest and scanned through a large part of the second one.  I wish I had just known that I could just skip both of them and still enjoy the book-- much more than I did by reading them.  I gave the book a rating of 4 stars out of 5.