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��[N]ot many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour - and in the oddest places! - for the lack of it.��

Sometimes a novel comes along that completely overpowers you. It sends your heart soaring to great heights on wings of perfect prose and then plummeting towards destruction on the rocks below. It crushes you and then rebuilds you from the wreckage then sends you out into the world, electrified by the experience, to contemplate the themes that are now humming through your entire body and mind. Giovanni’s Room is such a book. It’s perhaps too good. My emotions are just bleeding in a corner wanting to ask Baldwin “what the fuck is wrong with you, this was amazing.�� For really thought, this second novel by James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room adroitly addresses love, guilt, and our inner battles with ourselves over the two through a story and impeccable writing style that will have the reader exhausted from feeling all the feelings and thankful for it. It comes alive in the streets and bars of Paris as David, an American expatriate living in Paris (not unlike Baldwin himself at the time), struggles to accept himself and his feelings for Giovanni, nestling us into the titular room where they hide away from the world much like David is trying to hide his sexual identity. We experience how people who feel cornered often react in destructive ways. A powerhouse of a short novel that takes a sharp aim at the constricting social expectations of gender and sexuality while also exploring shame, expatriatism and the elusiveness of freedom, Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room feels perfect in all its design and execution.

��He made me think of home—perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.��

Feeling distraught by the US and its prevalent racism, James Baldwin left for Paris in 1948 where he hoped to be able to see himself outside of the context of American prejudice. ��Paris is, according to its legend,�� Baldwin wrote in his 1954 essay A Question of Identity , ��the city where everyone loses his head, and his morals, lives through at least one histoire d’amour, ceases, quite, to arrive anywhere on time, and thumbs his nose at the Puritans—the city, in brief, where all become drunken on the fine old air of freedom.�� It was in Paris he wrote his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain in 1953 and then, later, Giovanni’s Room in 1956, the latter featuring an American expatriate in Paris that allowed him to discuss many of his thoughts about the two countries juxtaposed by travel. While Baldwin would argue it was far from autobiographical, Room was in part inspired by a real man Baldwin had met which he discusses in a 1980 interview:

��We all met in a bar, there was a blond French guy sitting at a table, he bought us drinks. And, two or three days later, I saw his face in the headlines of a Paris paper. He had been arrested and was later guillotined . . . I saw him in the headlines, which reminded me that I was already working on him without knowing it.��

What he would work on became a perfect little novel, though his US publisher, Knopf, was not interested in it because they wanted him to write of the Black experience. Baldwin had done so quite successfully in his previous book but with Room felt he could not address this as well as themes on homosexuality together. ��The sexual-moral light was a hard thing to deal with. I could not handle both propositions in the same book,�� he admitted, ��there was no room for it.�� In , Baldwin says Knopf told him publishing a queer novel would alienate his audience and ��will ruin your career,�� stating they would not even publish it ��as a favour to you.�� So ��I told them, ‘Fuck you��,�� he says, and Giovanni’s Room was instead published under Dial Press.

We are all lucky for it, as this is a gorgeous book and it is a shame to think it almost never happened. Especially with how strikingly gorgeous the writing is, navigating the emotional currents with such poetic finesse that we, the reader, find ourselves totally at it’s mercy, gleeful and grateful to be caught in the tumultuous undertow as Baldwin sweeps us out to the sea of destruction with these characters. His dialog is pitch perfect and his atmosphere is so encompassing and vibrant we are there with David shivering in shame through the streets or awash in boozy, conflicted confidence in the bars. Baldwin handles words with the best of them.

��I stared at absurd Paris, which was as cluttered now, under the scalding sun, as the landscape of my heart.��

The novel almost feels like something from Ernest Hemingway at the outset, and perhaps this is what makes the subversion of the traditional concepts of masculinity play out even more effectively. David is living in Paris spending time with Hella, a girl he ��thought she would be fun to have fun with,�� and drinks his time away with friends while she is gone to Spain to consider his marriage proposal—something that seems more going through the motions of expectations than a heartfelt desire for marriage. The idea of an expatriate in Paris has been a frequently romanticized theme in US literature, and through the characters we get a taste of the idea ��you don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.�� This is true of Giovanni as well, who has left Italy after a personal tragedy and also uses travel as a means of escaping who one was to discover who they will become under a new geographical context. However, we see how ��nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom,�� and the characters find themselves feeling dislocated and unmoored more than anything, perhaps running to their own destruction in search of having anything to grasp.

�� Perhaps everybody has a garden of Eden, I don't know; but they have scarcely seen their garden before they see the flaming sword. Then, perhaps, life only offers the choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it.��

��The Americans have no sense of doom, none whatever,�� Baldwin reflects. ��They do not recognize doom when they see it,�� and right from the start we are keenly aware everything is careening towards imminent doom . The story is framed on the final day of Giovanni’s life before he faces the guillotine (the guillotine was last used in 1977 and then France outlawed capital punishment in 1981) and mostly told reflecting on the story of the time David and Giovanni spent together until Hella returns and everyone must face-up for their actions. There is a tone of dread permeating every facet of the novel, even worming its way into the nooks and crannies of desire so that we feel nearly suffocated by its imminence.

��The beast which Giovanni had awakened in me would never go to sleep again; but one day I would not be with Giovanni any more. And would I then, like all the others, find myself turning and following all kinds of boys down God knows what dark avenues, into what dark places? With this fearful intimation there opened in me hatred for Giovanni which was as powerful as my love and which was nourished by the same roots.��

This suffocation seems to impart the social forces that impose the shame and dread, largely because David struggles with a sense of identity that is outside the socially enforced expectations of gender and sexuality. In his childhood he hears arguments between between his widower father and Aunt Ellen, with his Aunt chastizing his drunkenness and womanizing as setting a bad example while his father expresses his desires for David to be a ��true man�� and ��when I say a man, Ellen, I don’t mean a Sunday school teacher.�� The expectations of what is masculinity haunt him, causing his early gay experiences to be a mark of shame and self-hatred in him.

��I couldn't be free until I was attached—no, committed—to someone.��

There are some very misogynistic moments in the novel—be advised—though Baldwin seems fairly aware of them as such and the comments by both David and Giovanni seems a reflection of the social conditioning they are struggling within. Not that this excuses their comments or behaviors. Though we also see how the gender expectations are even more oppressive for women, such as Hella’s discussion on how it is a ��humiliating necessity�� that women are disregarded unless she is attached to a man, ��to be at the mercy of some gross, unshaven strange before you can begin to be yourself.�� This doubles into the theme on how when chasing a sense of freedom, you often find yourself more constrained or oppressed.

��I was guilty and irritated and full of love and pain. I wanted to kick him and I wanted to take him in my arms��

The expectations of heteronormativity cause David great internal suffering and he can never fully give himself to Giovanni. We see this play out in David’s symbolic impressions of Giovanni’s room, seeing it as both a haven for love but, due to his shame and disgust with himself, begins to despise the room. His desires come chased with loathing and diffidence which is a destructive force that wounds not only the one who swallows it down but all those around them as well. As if they are bystanders to the blast. It becomes a betrayal, not only to the self, but to love in general.

��You want to leave Giovanni because he makes you stink. You want to despise Giovanni because he is not afraid of the stink of love. You want to kill him in the name of all your lying moralities. And you--you are immoral. You are, by far, the most immoral man I have met in all my life. Look, look what you have done to me. Do you think you could have done this if I did not love you? Is this what you should do to love?��

If one is caught up trying to play the role of who society thinks they should be, they can never be who they truly are and the dissonance between the hidden self and the public self brings only trauma. This becomes more intensely felt as one slips away from youth where playacting is more easily digestible. ��Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford and you are not that young anymore,�� David is warned. Warnings from older men appear all throughout the novel, with a particularly chilling moment in the bar when a man appears like a haggard and horrid seer from myths to broadcast David’s doom.

Self-deception becomes a major theme of the novel in this way. ��People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception,�� Baldwin writes and we witness how David’s acknowledgement of his own self-deception but unwillingness to fully depart from it becomes his own undoing. Similarly, the frustrations of others that become seemingly hopeless and unbearable destroys them in turn.

��People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.��

But it is also why we all must fight for a more welcoming and empathetic society that allows space for such things. The thing about social expectations is we are all complicit in them by perpetuating them instead of dismantling them and Giovanni’s Room is a call to confront this in life. We’ve come a long way, but there is still a lot to be done.

��If you cannot love me, I will die. Before you came I wanted to die, I have told you many times. It is cruel to have made me want to live only to make my death more bloody.��

I could rant forever about the power and beauty of Giovanni’s Room and Baldwin as an author in general. This is an emotional ride that will shake you to the core while dazzling you with pure poetic intensity. This is a novel full of incredible social and interpersonal criticisms that bruise you but make you better for it and I cannot wait to read literally everything Baldwin wrote. Giovanni’s Room is not only a queer masterpiece but an all around amazing and essential novel.

5/5

��No matter how it seems now, I must confess: I loved him. I do not think that I will ever love anyone like that again.��