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Whatever blows away from us surely must come back.
Suppressing guilt and shame is not letting go, it is running away from feelings which are doomed to catch up to you if unaddressed.
Guilt may be just as powerful as love. But while love wraps around you, guilt suffocates you.
David, in the end, believes that his love for Giovanni has come undone. He can admit that Giovanni is beautiful, even special, yes, but he cannot accept that his love for Giovanni is undying.
He certainly cannot accept that his heart belongs to Giovanni, given the times they are born into and the circumstances they are in.
And yet, this book is less of a love story and more of a story of two suffering men who, when separated, grieve to the point of no return.
Some may say that this grief symbolizes their love, but really, this grief, to me, symbolizes their suffering.
The two men intoxicated each other. Giovanni was dependent on David and vice versa on a level that was beyond commitment; it was unhealthy.
I wonder what this book would produce if the plot remained the same, but the two men were instead women.
Two women in love can still be just as intoxicating. But we may, perhaps, not see a desperation for the dominance of men, just as we see in this novel the mens' desperation for the dominance of women.
If Giovanni and David were women, they may force themselves to find the same intensity with men.
But, within the constraints of the patriarchy, the two (hypothetical) women would succumb to being submissive to men.
Why is this what I highlight in this review? Because the parts of the novel that disturbed me the most were not the way Giovanni and David treated each other in their most grotesque moments, but the way Giovanni and David gave into their dominance of women.
It is seen in how they feel the need to refer to the women as girls, far more than they would begin to dare to refer to a man as a boy.
David's interaction with Sue, who he refers to as a girl, emboldened this need for dominance:
"she inexpertly smeared across this grimace a bright, girlish gaiety---as rigid as the skeleton beneath her flabby body" (pg. 102).
Why must the men, David especially, make it a point to think of women as younger than they are? Do the men do this to think of themselves as younger? Or do they do this to think of themselves as older, and perhaps wiser?
Every character in this book is messed up and bruised and numb from pain.
Every character clings to the beautiful, clings to the chance to escape.
Isn't life all at once tragic, sickening, and beautiful?