Out of Giovanni's Room
- Julie Heming
- Mar 26, 2019
- 2 min read
Paris, the city of love.
Or rather, the city of love and then loss, those winding alleys and riverbank paths where the sun that once dawned on spring mornings now settles coldly over the Seine. The city you can't wait to go to, and then can't wait to leave.
I'm talking about its role in literature, of course, and not reality (though maybe it extends to the real city, or any city, too). In novels, Paris usually acts as a metaphor for the protagonist's relationship with another human character, one that begins blooming with love and desire and a kinship with Parisian life, before the twisting streets too soon choke it all to death, and the characters, clawing their way out of the cobblestones, announce their departure from this city and their now-forsaken relationships.
In Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin, Paris plays a similar role. David is a young, blonde, "stereotypical" American, left alone in Paris while his girlfriend travels through Spain, deciding whether or not she wants to marry him. Alone for this extended period of time, David begins to make his own friends and acquaintances, and one night, at a particular bar in a particular quarter, David meets Giovanni, the new bartender.
David and Giovanni are almost immediately drawn to each other, and what begins in lust soon transforms into love, or something like it. David lives with Giovanni in the latter's small place - a single, dirty room.
As the relationship progresses, this room becomes the source of their love and pain, a place they retreat to, and a place they long to escape from.
Because their relationship is complicated. For one, David is still technically dating Hella. For another, in the 1950s-1960s, being homosexual was undesirable. And even within the community, and David's very self, power plays and internal struggles corrode the romance.
It becomes clear to David that Giovanni is in love with him, perhaps to an unhealthy extent. And David still hasn't come to terms with his sexuality. He loves Giovanni and hates him. He misses Hella and doesn't. Mostly, though, he is indifferent to both, a mechanism he uses to distance himself from his own questions about who he is and who he loves.
When Hella returns to Paris, David's relationship with Giovanni disintegrates and everything spirals. When David begins telling his story in the first chapter, he reveals that Giovanni is in jail, awaiting the guillotine.
This book deals with love, loss, sexuality, and masculinity. It also addresses being an outsider, a foreigner, due to nationality (being an American living in Paris, like David), but also sexuality (being gay in a hetero normative society) and race (being black in a white world, like Baldwin himself when he lived in Paris).
The novels also drops you completely into the world David enters, and while none of the characters are particularly likable, they surprise us with the depth of their emotions and their sometimes extremely articulate assessments of human nature.
The book is short but packs a punch. And it's beautifully written, giving insight and commentary into, overall, the universality of pain and love.
9/10 📕
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