”He grasped me by the collar, wrestling and caressing at once, fluid and iron at once: saliva spraying from his lips and his eyes full of tears, but with the bones of his face showing and the muscles leaping in his arms and neck. ‘You want to leave Giovanni because he makes you stink. You want to despise Giovanni because he is not afraid of the stink of love. You want to kill him in the name of all your lying moralities. And you--you are immoral. You are, by far, the most immoral man I have met in all my life. Look, look what you have done to me. Do you think you could have done this if I did not love you? Is this what you should do to love?’” James Baldwin in Harlem.David is an American living in Paris attempting to find himself. His girlfriend Hella is in Spain taking some time to think about whether she wants to commit the rest of her life to David. Meanwhile David is out of funds and his father is willing to let him starve a bit in the hopes that he will come home. He is, after all, getting a bit old, pushing thirty, to still be looking for himself. There is this legitimate fear that he will never find himself, and if that is the case he might as well come home and rejoin the real world of marriages, careers, and cocktails. He meets Giovanni, not because he is looking for someone, but because he is paying the price of borrowing money from Jacques, an old lecherous American business man who will lend you money, but it will cost you time entertaining him with your presence and your conversation. Hopefully you are not so desperate that it will cost you even more. Jacques finds Giovanni attractive and hopes that David can convince the young man to have a drink with them. The best laid plans of salacious old men rarely bear fruit. They have to be patient and wait for the specter of starvation to land them a pliable playmate. This is one of those times when it all backfires on Jacques, but he will continue to spin a web and wait for a bobble in finances. After all, Paris is an expensive city and with so many young men on the verge of destitution he only has to wait for a tug on one of his many sugared threads. David goes home with Giovanni.”I was trembling. I thought, if I do not open the door at once and get out of here, I am lost. But I knew I could not open the door, I knew it was too late; soon it was too late to do anything but moan. He pulled me against him, putting himself into my arms as though he were giving me himself to carry, and slowly pulled me down with him to that bed. With everything in me screaming No! yet the sum of me sighed Yes.”Giovanni’s Room comes to define David’s whole Parisian experience. ”The table was loaded with yellowing newspapers and empty bottles and it held a single brown and wrinkled potato in which even the sprouting eyes were rotten. Red wine had been spilled on the floor, it had been allowed to dry and it made the air in the room sweet and heavy. But it was not the room’s disorder which was frightening, it was the fact that when one began searching for the key to this disorder one realized that it was not be found in any of the usual places. For this was not a matter of habit or circumstance or temperament; it was a matter of punishment and grief.” James Baldwin in Paris.David is astute enough to recognize that this is not just a fling for Giovanni, but a true attempt to not only find love, but to also escape the past, the present, and an increasingly gloomy looking future. ”I understood why Giovanni had wanted me and had brought me to his last retreat. I was to destroy this room and give to Giovanni a new and better life. This life could only be my own, which, in order to transform Giovanni’s, must first become part of Giovanni’s room.”David, operating with a safety net, can afford to have an “unnatural” fling, after all he is in France not America, but for Giovanni this is a heart and soul relationship. As David dances around his own desires and the realization that he must eventually straighten up and become a devoted member of heterosexual America it becomes increasingly difficult to know what to do about Giovanni. ”The beast which Giovanni had awakened in me would never go to sleep again; but one day I would not be with Giovanni anymore, And would I then, like all the others, find myself turning and following all kinds of boys down God knows what dark avenues, into what dark places?”Hella, like a lifeboat on the horizon, writes to say she has made her choice. She is coming back to Paris to be with David. Elation and dread suddenly tinge the unraveling of all of his loosely conceived relationships.Under the guise of some bizarre logic David decides he must be with a woman, as if to create a demarcation line between Giovanni and Hella. It doesn’t really matter what woman, just a woman. The lucky winner is Sue, but David doesn’t get away without a dagger of remorse pricking his darkening soul. ”’Maybe you’ll be lonely again,’ she said, finally. ‘I guess I won’t mind if you come looking for me.’ She wore the strangest smile I had ever seen. It was pained and vindictive and humiliated but she inexpertly smeared across this grimace a bright, girlish gaiety--as rigid as the skeleton beneath her flabby body. If fate ever allowed Sue to reach me, she would kill me with just that smile.”I’ll leave the rest to you fair reader. There are more twists and turns and the fates of many rest on the resolve of one man and whether he can be honest about his own nature. The Elegant Mr. James BaldwinJames Baldwin’s publisher gave him some advice in regards to this manuscript. He felt he must “burn the book because the theme of homosexuality would alienate him from his readership among black people.” Fortunately, he was wrong. Critics, thank goodness, were kind to the book because of Baldwin’s reputation and status as a writer. Sure this book makes the list of best gay/lesbian books ever written, but it also makes the list of many BEST BOOKS ever written.I’m going to come out of the closet and say I’m a heterosexual male, although why... I’m not sure... except that I’m just wired that way. The same way that the various sexually self-designated people are wired to be attracted to a multitude of diversely sexually oriented people. To say this is a gay novel certainly is not an attempt to denigrate the book, but it does seem to limit the scope of the vision. There is viciousness, lust, loneliness, deception, sorrow, tenderness, despair, and ultimately tragedy that makes this book easily one of the top 100 best books I’ve ever read. Every reader will find something of themselves in this book, maybe not the part of themselves that they want to hold up to the mirror, but certainly a fragment, disdainful in nature or worthy of pity, that can not be denied. This really should be my second or third reading of this novel, but somehow it has been on my radar and fallen off my radar numerous times over the years. A helpful nudge from John Irving in his book In One Person convinced me that I needed to quit dawdling and read this book. The Paris of the 1950s doesn’t exist anymore, but luckily for you and I it is still vibrantly alive in the pages of this book. If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.comI also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten
Giovanni’s room tells the story of a man who is trying to make sense of his sexuality in a social setting that prevents him from expressing his true self. The narrative flows in the style of a confession as the narrator indulges in some serious introspection.David is an American living in Paris, awaiting his girlfriend’s return from Spain. When he visits a gay bar to discuss a proposition for money with a friend, he meets a bartender called Giovanni. They are attracted to each other instantly and he has an illicit relationship with Giovanni. They live together and during this phase, David plays the role of a housewife while Giovanni is the moneymaker.‘We gave each other joy that night.’David reminisces over his first sexual affair with a guy named Joey in his past. He refers to the act as one of joy and the subtlety used by James Baldwin is just amazing. ‘Joy’ here means ‘unfiltered passion’ and how the sudden heightening of emotions could overtake the voice in your head that forebodes you. He wants it, he gets it. There is no conflict of mind. However, in the morning, this voice reinstates reign and pushes him into a life of eternal misery that makes him distant from Giovanni.‘With everything in me screaming No! yet the sum of me sighed Yes.’Once Giovanni and David walk into Giovanni's apartment, they are more relaxed as they are not subject to the scrutinizing eye. It feels as though as long as they are in the privacy of that room, they can be themselves. When Giovanni and David touch for the first time, David's instant reaction is one of resistance but that is futile because the needs of the body takes over. While David’s mind is constantly combating the desire, his body shouts a YES which is more audible than the blaring No. This again is a depiction of how he succumbs to passion.‘A cavern opened in my mind, black, full of rumor, suggestion, of half-heard, half-forgotten, half-understood stories, full of dirty words. I thought I saw my future in that cavern. I was afraid.’ ‘People have very dirty words for—for this situation. Besides, it is a crime—in my country and, after all, I didn't grow up here, I grew up there.’ Feelings for each other stir but David’s denial increases as they become closer. He is excessively conscious of what the society might think of him and this acts as an impediment for articulation. Surprisingly, never once does David stop to blame others for their narrow mindedness or the rigid laws. He does not view gay sex as a sin either. Instead, he blames himself for it and just wants to forget it ever happened. He neither fights against the society nor lets the love take its course. Or maybe he just wants to stay in his comfort zone?This creates a problem between Giovanni and David because they both have polarizing needs. His only solution, according to him, is the termination of the relationship between them.‘I want to get out of this room. I want to get away from you, I want to end this terrible scene.’With the passing of time, David’s only goal is to go beyond the reach of Giovanni and he successfully does this when his girlfriend returns from Spain. His turmoil results in a proposal and when she agrees to marry him, he says that he wants to get out of Giovanni’s room. He views that as equivalent to moving out of Paris and is often questioned by his girlfriend as to why it is such a big issue. He fails to explain it to her clearly and instead fibs saying he finds Giovanni very dramatic. Allegorically, all he wants to do is get out of the trap that is Giovanni’s love because he finds himself going back there. He convinces himself that the familiarity of having a wife and kids, which he finds common in the general public, is what he wants.‘And I do not know what moves in this body, what this body is searching. It is trapped in my mirror as it is trapped in time and it hurries toward revelation.’ In the end, he concludes that he does not understand his body. It is interesting how James Baldwin isolates the needs of his body from the needs of his heart. David does not question why he loves Giovanni but instead names what he has a carnal desire that does not die.Was there an awakening? Yes.Was there an acceptance? No.It was doomed love from the beginning but the reasons for the failure are important as they are relevant in the current scenario too.Even though the narrator is highly erratic with his contradicting feelings towards love, the words of James Baldwin appear very lucid and sometimes, even relatable. The pandemonium caused by a mind that always takes caution of what the society thinks is well demonstrated. That’s why I loved the book as much as I did. I’d definitely recommend it for the literary merit it holds despite the publisher wanting to burn the book.
What do You think about Giovanni's Room (2000)?
I feel it difficult to write about Baldwin's "Giovanni's Room", as it happens sometimes with the books that move me.Giovanni's room is the title of the book and its main metaphor. On one hand the room is a metaphor of Giovanni's life: dirty, unkempt, overloaded with garbage, waste and memories that are better left alone. Bringing David to his room, Giovanni invites him to his life, and at the same time becomes vulnerable. On the other hand Giovanni's room represents a prison, a crammed closed space, or rather the only space where the two men can hide from the judging eyes of the society, where they can express what they feel and be themselves. No wonder that such space is too small for squeezing one's lives into or imagining one's future there. The room is opressing and eventually leads to David's breaking out from it. "I scarcely know how to describe that room. It became, in a way, every room I had ever been in and every room I find myself in hereafter will remind me of Giovanni's room."Among other topics the book analyzes guilt and the strength of the normative gender roles imposed on us by the society upon our birth, as well as the difficulty of transgressing them. The language and the style Baldwin uses are simply beautiful, despite of the fact that the book is opressing, just as Giovanni's room itself. "Giovanni's Room" is a recommended and memorable read for those who are not afraid of taking a deep dive into the human nature and bringing to surface some of the most repressed or unwelcomed layers.
—Giedre
God, Giovanni's Room is heart-breaking. I've been avoiding reviewing it, a bit, because it boils so much to the surface. No summary or review could do this book total justice. What Baldwin achieves is a desperate account of two gay-or-bisexual men struggling with their sexuality, their society, and most importantly their identities: identities which are at once masculine and yet deprived of that masculinity by their complicity with a society that doesn't understand them. Baldwin's artistry is formulating a novel about same-sex love that isn't an absurdly supportive utopia nor a bland coming-out story (see: all LGBT literature, most of which is aimed at young adults, and is stylistically reflective of that audience). Giovanni's Room is the dusk to E.M. Forster's dawn in Maurice. Baldwin's real achievement is to make his story universal. The love between Giovanni and David is not a "homosexual love" or "same sex love" - it's just love, and Baldwin tells us that is all love needs to be to be real. Perhaps it is the effect of reading Barthes that I find myself disdainful towards the self-bulwarking of gay "otherness" - newspaper stories which send the overt message of "gays can do it too!" actually serve to reinforce that gays are something other than normal. Those stories do not change the perception that "gays cannot" but rather reinforce it by providing the exception to the rule. "A little 'confessed' evil saves one from acknowledging a lot of hidden evil'" By admitting the small prejudice, you allow the larger prejudices to grow disproportionately. Baldwin refuses to let his novel be about gay men in love, and instead makes it about two people in love. The closest comparison I can find in my literary repertory is The Age of Innocence, which I think is an apt sister novel to Baldwin's. Restrained by a rigged society and his engagement to the fair Hella, David must give up his true passion for Giovanni. But it is so much the worse ending for Giovanni than Ellen Olenska: while Ellen lives a supposedly fulfilling life in Paris, Giovanni rapidly descends to corruption, self-loathing, and death: "If you cannot love me, I will die. Before you came I wanted to die, I have told you many times. It is cruel to have made me want to live only to make my death more bloody."David's role in Giovanni's life is not that of a passive lover, he and Giovanni share something real, a true kinship which David cannot feel for Hella and which Giovanni cannot bear to lose. I find significance in the names of the three lovers, David, Hella, and Giovanni. David is from the Hebrew for beloved, and he is mutually beloved by Hella and Giovanni, though he largely resents those loves, first Hella's then Giovanni's. He feels as burdened by their loves as he does by the constraints of appearances and by society, and so he can never be truly happy, he can never truly relish in the love of another, because he cannot bear to the the object of affection, only the subject. David is profoundly selfish, and profoundly evasive to the attention he receives. He paradoxically wants love but cannot bear the responsibilities that go with it. In the Bible, David is much loved by God, but his sexual transgressions with Bathsheba bring hate and misfortune to him. Baldwin's David likewise betrays Hella, and the war between his compunction and his survival instinct ruin what life remains for him: Giovanni is gone, Hella is gone, what remains of his life is a homelessness (if, in fact, home is where the heart is) and an emptiness. He is inconsolably lost: he is haunted by the past that remains inside him, but also by the past which has escaped him: People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen forget.David manages to be doubly the madman.Hella, derived from "Helga," though with the unavoidable echo of "Hell," means, ironically, "blessed." What is she blessed with? She is naive and insecure, she is alternatively too timid and too bold to find love with David. She chooses a long engagement and spends that time alone in Spain rather than in Paris with David. Hella reminds me very much of James' "innocents abroad" - and for that reason I find her being blessed only by way of her avoiding the ultimate corruption of David's black heart. Her blessing seems to her like a curse, but ultimately we feel she is far better off alone than she would be had she tied the know with our narrator, a man so confused and self-loathing he is incapable of loving anyone. For David, he knows that life with Hella would be a "Hell" to him, it would be to chain him to something less than love, something like friendship, but which would block him forever from his true passion. His love for Giovanni has made love for Hella impossible, and marriage to her would be a constant reminder of what he has lost.Giovanni is a derivative from the Hebrew for "God's Gift" - and he is a blessing to David. Giovanni shows David what love is capable of being, what it means to find love and solace in another human on this Earth. But David cannot accept this gift. He grows hateful of it. It is not love or deference for Hella which makes David give up Giovanni, but his own blindness and self-hatred. He is not deserving of Giovanni's love, and it makes us hateful to ourselves, even the most selfish of us, to receive something in the name of our merits when we have not lived up to those merits. Those undeserved gifts are a constant reminder of our inadequacies and instead of raising us up they tear us asunder from the inside-out. Giovanni is the gift of real freedom, the freedom of choice - the gift that God bestowed on man. "For nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom." David cannot bear the responsibility of choice: particularly the choice between a precarious bliss with Giovanni and an assured unhappiness with Hella.
—David
A beautiful, haunting book about a man who moves to Paris to find himself – only to fall in love with a man and lose himself even more. Giovanni’s Room has great force in all areas: fantastic writing, endless passion, and several strongly developed themes. Our protagonist, David, is repressed by his sexuality and feels lost in his uncouth desires. We know from the beginning that things don’t end well, but that does not lessen the bittersweet heartbreak that unfolds. Even though this book takes place in the 1950s its message continues to play a prominent part in contemporary society. This will not be my last book by James Baldwin.*review cross-posted on my blog, the quiet voice.
—Thomas
