Giovanni's Room
by James Baldwin
This is my second time reading this book, and the only novel of Baldwin's that I have read. If you would like to learn more about his life and work please check out this biography by the Poetry Foundation.
My first read I knew nothing about this book, and assumed it was some kind of "romance" novel, whatever that means. It is quite beautiful and many scenes are very romantic in a sense, but having read it twice, I wouldn't call it a romance novel. It is more a tragic love story which explores various themes including identity, love, and societal expectations.
The narrator, David, is an American living in Paris during the events of the novel. He is engaged to a woman named Hella, yet he seemingly starts to fall in love with a bartender named Giovanni. He begins to question his feelings towards Hella and he struggles to reconcile with both his sexuality and preconceived notions of manhood.
David's shame about his sexuality permeates his thinking and heavily skews his perception of his own identity. He is drawn toward a relationship with Giovanni, but constantly reassures himself that it is unbecoming to have relations with another man. His preconceived notions about masculinity dictate that he can't be doing what he so desperately wants. David constantly struggles with who he is and what he believes he should be like.
David describes Giovanni's room as a dark dingy place of shame and sin. A stark projection of his own perception of himself and how he thinks about his feelings for Giovanni. David becomes so concerned with his sense of identity that he fails to consider how anyone, especially Giovanni, feels about the way he acts.
Slowly, his shame eats him up and destroys any relationships he might hope to maintain. Hella leaves him for being unfaithful. He uses another woman, Sue, to re-affirm his confused sense of masculinity. The other men who spend money on David seem to hate him by the end, and his father says that he feels like he failed to adequately raise David.
Whether about sexuality or not, that kind of shame is disturbingly familiar and often hopelessly encompassing. When we inherently believe that something about ourselves is wrong or undesirable it can stop anyone, including ourselves, from loving what might actually not be so wrong. What makes this book so heartbreaking is David's inability to cope with what he sees as defective within himself, and that society largely agrees with him. How it destroys everything around him, and how he never manages to deal with it.
This book is short and Baldwin's style is easily digestible. I would recommend anyone to read this book. I don't care who you are. Go read it.
"You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back."
