osprey_archer (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
osprey_archer) wrote2020-06-12 07:42 pm
osprey_archer) wrote2020-06-12 07:42 pm
Book Review: Giovanni’s Room
I mentioned in the Wednesday Reading Meme that I wanted to read some James Baldwin, and my own particular library branch happened to have Giovanni’s Room on hand, so I checked it out… and now I have read it and I am crushed and emotionally compromised.
(Although the Everyman’s Library edition has a black man on the cover, the main character and in fact the entire cast is white. The introduction quotes Baldwin’s comment, “I certainly could not possibly have - not at that point in my life - handled the other great weight, the ‘Negro problem.’ The sexual-moral light was a hard thing to deal with. I could not handle both propositions in the same book.” I feel a cover with two white guys staring at each other in an intensely homoerotic yet antagonistic manner would more closely fit the book’s actual content.)
The novel, set in the 1950s when it was written, tells the story of David, an American who has gone to Paris in order to run away from/embrace his homosexuality. These are, you will note, opposite actions; he oscillates between the two, and does both badly. (And it should be noted that by “embrace” I don’t mean “emotionally accept,” I definitely just mean that he keeps banging guys.)
This sort of doubling is shot through David’s character. He is attracted to Giovanni, and hence repulsed by him (because repulsed by his own attraction to men); he loves Giovanni and hates him, he wants to stay with him and feels that he is suffocating in Giovanni’s room. Although the effect is most pronounced in relationship to his attraction to men, this alienation from his own feelings - alienation is maybe not strong enough; it’s a loathing, an antagonism, and it infects everything else in his life, all his relationships, all his actions, his ability to feel anything wholeheartedly or sincerely.
Giovanni’s Room put me in mind of Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, another book with a narrator so crushed by his own internalized homophobia that he can barely admit even to himself that he’s attracted to men. (Also, the boyfriend character in both books is about 10,000 times more in touch with his emotions than that narrator, and in particular more capable of experiencing genuine joy when the circumstances allow.)
But Giovanni’s Room is much darker (and The Goldfinch is not exactly a walk in the park!) In The Goldfinch, the other characters realize that Theo is an adorable human dumpster fire; in Giovanni’s Room, both Giovanni (David’s boyfriend) and Hella (his fiancee) have nothing like this level of insight into David. They take him as he presents himself, and because he has fragmented himself so aggressively, this gives them nothing like the complete picture.
Hella does not know that David is gay; he is, after all, trying very hard to hide it. Giovanni, meanwhile - well, Giovanni is the bartender at a gay bar where David goes because he is “intent on proving, to them and to myself, that I was not of their company. I did this by being in their company a great deal and manifesting toward all of them a tolerance which placed me, I believed, above suspicion.”
But of course Giovanni isn’t aware of this tortured rationale. He figures that David’s just looking for a boyfriend, a take that David seems to corroborate by moving into Giovanni’s room and making love to him and basically mooching off him all summer. (This is especially egregious because David comes from an almost infinitely more comfortable background than Giovanni, who is barely scraping by.) Only far too late does Giovanni realize that David will not and perhaps cannot love Giovanni for more than the most fleeting of instants, when that feeling overwhelms David’s carefully constructed armor.
This all makes David sound absolutely awful, and, let’s be clear: he is awful. You can’t even trot out “Well but he’s even WORSE to himself than to other people,” because as awful as he is to himself, the consequences of David's awfulness are far worse for Giovanni than anything that happens to David. (This isn’t a spoiler; we learn that Giovanni’s about to be guillotined on about page three.)
But at the same time, David is so vividly, mercilessly drawn, this mixture of harshly repressed tenderness and self-protective cruelty, that I found the book terribly compelling and… not hard to put down, exactly, I did keep putting it down because it was hard to read about such sadness. But I kept having to pick it back up.
(Although the Everyman’s Library edition has a black man on the cover, the main character and in fact the entire cast is white. The introduction quotes Baldwin’s comment, “I certainly could not possibly have - not at that point in my life - handled the other great weight, the ‘Negro problem.’ The sexual-moral light was a hard thing to deal with. I could not handle both propositions in the same book.” I feel a cover with two white guys staring at each other in an intensely homoerotic yet antagonistic manner would more closely fit the book’s actual content.)
The novel, set in the 1950s when it was written, tells the story of David, an American who has gone to Paris in order to run away from/embrace his homosexuality. These are, you will note, opposite actions; he oscillates between the two, and does both badly. (And it should be noted that by “embrace” I don’t mean “emotionally accept,” I definitely just mean that he keeps banging guys.)
This sort of doubling is shot through David’s character. He is attracted to Giovanni, and hence repulsed by him (because repulsed by his own attraction to men); he loves Giovanni and hates him, he wants to stay with him and feels that he is suffocating in Giovanni’s room. Although the effect is most pronounced in relationship to his attraction to men, this alienation from his own feelings - alienation is maybe not strong enough; it’s a loathing, an antagonism, and it infects everything else in his life, all his relationships, all his actions, his ability to feel anything wholeheartedly or sincerely.
Giovanni’s Room put me in mind of Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, another book with a narrator so crushed by his own internalized homophobia that he can barely admit even to himself that he’s attracted to men. (Also, the boyfriend character in both books is about 10,000 times more in touch with his emotions than that narrator, and in particular more capable of experiencing genuine joy when the circumstances allow.)
But Giovanni’s Room is much darker (and The Goldfinch is not exactly a walk in the park!) In The Goldfinch, the other characters realize that Theo is an adorable human dumpster fire; in Giovanni’s Room, both Giovanni (David’s boyfriend) and Hella (his fiancee) have nothing like this level of insight into David. They take him as he presents himself, and because he has fragmented himself so aggressively, this gives them nothing like the complete picture.
Hella does not know that David is gay; he is, after all, trying very hard to hide it. Giovanni, meanwhile - well, Giovanni is the bartender at a gay bar where David goes because he is “intent on proving, to them and to myself, that I was not of their company. I did this by being in their company a great deal and manifesting toward all of them a tolerance which placed me, I believed, above suspicion.”
But of course Giovanni isn’t aware of this tortured rationale. He figures that David’s just looking for a boyfriend, a take that David seems to corroborate by moving into Giovanni’s room and making love to him and basically mooching off him all summer. (This is especially egregious because David comes from an almost infinitely more comfortable background than Giovanni, who is barely scraping by.) Only far too late does Giovanni realize that David will not and perhaps cannot love Giovanni for more than the most fleeting of instants, when that feeling overwhelms David’s carefully constructed armor.
This all makes David sound absolutely awful, and, let’s be clear: he is awful. You can’t even trot out “Well but he’s even WORSE to himself than to other people,” because as awful as he is to himself, the consequences of David's awfulness are far worse for Giovanni than anything that happens to David. (This isn’t a spoiler; we learn that Giovanni’s about to be guillotined on about page three.)
But at the same time, David is so vividly, mercilessly drawn, this mixture of harshly repressed tenderness and self-protective cruelty, that I found the book terribly compelling and… not hard to put down, exactly, I did keep putting it down because it was hard to read about such sadness. But I kept having to pick it back up.