Garth Greenwell: Intimate Truths

The annual Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction Awards delights in taking bundles of limbs and badly chosen adjectives, removing them from their context and mocking them for their unsexiness. But there is real power in its opposite: by capturing the truth of physical encounters the finest literature can — without prurience or pornography — illuminate raw truths about being alive. And in this, Garth Greenwell is without peer. With spare, passionate language that revisits and builds on the world of his celebrated debut What Belongs to You, the author has created a sublime, glorious novel which unfolds over nine interlinking stories. In Cleanness, his unnamed narrator provides a searing examination of foreignness, intimacy, memory and desire as he reflects on his life in Sofia, Bulgaria. For this event, part of the 2020 Edinburgh International Book Festival Online, Greenwell talks to Damian Barr, expanding on his novel’s haunting meditations on our public and private selves.