GIOVANNI'S ROOM (Book Review)

I must admit that, when a book is termed a classic, I feel intimidated. I think of titles such as Beowulf, The Canterbury Tales and James Joyce’s Ulysses. I assume the book will be challenging for my brain to access. The language will be too flowery and high-brow, perhaps even archaic. The dialogue will be too smart, as though only the author and select readers are in on the joke. I even dread the fact individual paragraphs may ramble on for a couple of pages. 

 

I pre-judge classics. I avoid them. Instead, I pick up a “beach read” without a pang of guilt.

 

This is why I told myself that I’d never read Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin which is widely regarded as a gay classic. I got so far as checking it out once from the library, but I returned it when it came due, never having opened the cover. 

 

While helping clean out the house of Evan’s highly literate aunt who died of cancer in the fall, Giovanni’s Room stared at me from a bookshelf. I’d been looking for another title Pilar had recommended to me but, alas, never found it. Giovanni called my name. 

 

All right, dammit. I took it. 

 

I finally read it this past week. 

 

What surprised me from the first page was how accessible it was. If I had to reread sentences, it was on account of my drifting mind rather than Baldwin stuffing them with six-syllable synonyms for “happy” and prepositional phrases that leaned into Old English. Set mostly in Paris, it’s true that there were a fair number of French statements, but I understood most of them—perhaps Duolingo has actually done some good. Regardless, the French asides were not essential to understanding the story.  

 

Published seventy years ago, Giovanni’s Room is about an American in Paris, David, a blond man in his late twenties who likes to drink a lot and otherwise seems aimless. (It surprised me that the main character—and every character—was white since Baldwin was Black. Being ignorant of anything about the story, I’d at least looked forward to reading about a Black gay character.) 

 

David meets Giovanni, a bartender hired for his good looks at a gay bar owned by Guillaume, one of two older, richer gay men (the other being Jacques) whom David and Giovanni view with disgust but from whom they readily accept money. There is some clever conversation between David and Giovanni on that first night, the American versus the Italian, and it is Giovanni who declares, rather quickly, that they are friends. 

“Ah!” cried Giovanni. “Don’t you know when

you have made a friend?”

 

I knew I must look foolish and that my 

question was foolish too: “So soon?”

 

“Why no,” he said, reasonably, and 

looked at this watch, “we can wait

another hour if you like. We can be-

come friends then. Or we can wait

until closing time. We can become

friends then. Or we can wait until

tomorrow, only that means that you

must come in here tomorrow and

perhaps you have something else

to do.” He put his watch away and

leaned both elbows on the bar.

“Tell me,” he said. “what is this thing

about time? Why is it better to be

late than early? People are always

saying, we must wait, we must wait.

What are they waiting for?”

 

By morning, David, who may be bisexual or just very closeted—his girlfriend Hella is wandering Spain—has gone back to Giovanni’s room, a small unkempt maid’s chamber on the outskirts of Paris. David doesn’t have the money to continue paying for his own hotel room so he stays with Giovanni in the cramped space for several months until Hella’s return.

 

This is when things get complicated and matters unravel. David and Giovanni have fallen in love but David still tells himself he loves Hella. In fact, he is intent on marrying her. 

 

The story does not end well, the fate of one character mentioned on the third page of the novel. It’s how things get to that point that made me read to the end. 

 

While Giovanni’s Room turned out to be readable, I can’t say I loved it. The passage quoted above is my favourite part and, if there had been banter like that throughout, I would have been more entertained. But this is one of those books that is lite on action and heavy on the internal thinking of the main character. I’m not sure I even liked David and it probably didn’t help that he and Giovanni find Guillaume and Jacques disgusting mainly for the fact they are older, less attractive, less fit gay men. The older men are regularly referred to as vile—if anything they may be predatory regarding the two younger characters but Giovanni and David play the older two for money and, in Giovanni’s case, work. The lines seem blurry as to who’s preying on whom.

 

I am glad I finally read Giovanni’s Room. I don’t feel quite as shallow as a gay reader even as I track down one of Rachel Reid’s gay romances from the Game Changer series which led to the steamy TV series, Heated Rivalry. And, oh, how times have changed. Wikipedia’s entry about James Baldwin noted that Giovanni’s Room, “caused great controversy when it was first published in 1956 due to its explicit homoerotic content.” Reading that remark, I am at a loss for what that content was. Most everything happens off the page and certainly there wasn’t anything explicit of the caliber of many of today’s gay works. Not that that does much for me. Really, I just wanted something more to happen on the page… something plot-driven, in particular.

 

One must-read gay novel finished. I have so many more to consider…