I can’t get away from references to James Baldwin. It seems he is a writer’s writer. And, unless there was a short story or essay somewhere along the line, I have never read him. Until now. I started with Giovanni’s Room simply because we were reading it for book club. Perhaps I should have read instead his Notes of a Native Son, The Fire Next Time, Go Tell It on the Mountain, or Nobody Knows My Name. But I suspect that one of his themes really shines in this book that doesn’t as much in the others, which is sexuality. Giovanni’s Room is a clear, clean book and I can see why his writing has endured and why modern writers would find something interesting in his autobiographical themes of sexuality, race, and politics even though he was writing in the 1940s-1980s. I thought it was a good book. Did I enjoy reading it? Maybe not so much.

For one, it is really alcohol-soaked. That’s not my main point, but I’m just going to go through my notes as they are on my notes page. I always have a hard time relating to people who live in a constant state of drinking and/or drunk. But more than that, the characters in this book are aimless. Many are gold diggers and childish. There is a sense of floating through life that is almost apathy. Or, put in another way, the main character, David (whose name is almost never said) is a very, very passive character. And selfish. And self-centered. Which fits right in with the Bohemian-ness of this book. I kept thinking of the song from Moulin Rouge with the line, “What do we believe in? Freedom, Beauty, Truth, Love.” Well, I’ve read enough books with Bohemian ideals and (even though I love Moulin Rouge), I find the worldview (including that you can’t fake it or it will kill you) to be false. (Also, you don’t really get to make choices, you just have to be who you are. See, I told you it was relevant to today.) So that was playing out as I was reading this, as well. And it’s not my cup of tea.

I guess my bottom line is this: Giovanni’s Room is great, clean writing, for sure. But the subject matter didn’t interest me (specifically this moneyed/impoverished, Bohemian life in 1950s Paris) and the pacing also didn’t do it for me. Paris, fine. It was a swift style of writing, but very little manages to happen. It gets dramatic, but not until near the end. Until then, Baldwin relies on us being moved emotionally as opposed to the story doing much moving. He relies on our sympathy or, in some cases, empathy. For some people in book club, the book was “raw” and “tough to read.”

Meanwhile, I hated the main character and pretty much everyone else in the book. No, everyone. They were all selfish and narrow-minded and I couldn’t find redemption in the apathy or in the ending. (I don’t know that we’re supposed to. But I like to.) I might have found something in Hella, but Baldwin’s women—at least in Giovanni’s Room—are terribly written. Also, any statements made about women in general are rough. I was like, this is the 1950s and these are largely gay men, but I still feel offended by that view, sir. Then I read on.

Note: there is a lot of French spoken by the characters in this book. Because it’s Paris. However, there is no translation, and in some scenes, there are not even contextual clues to figure it out. Either you already know French, or you have to look it up—or just ignore it because you’re annoyed and skip it. I know quite a bit of French but still looked some of it up. I just don’t understand why when a book is in one language it doesn’t always have footnote translations for any other language. I don’t get it.

Another note: it was not illegal to be gay in Paris at the time, though it was in the U.S. It was, however, still discouraged and sometimes persecuted.

The structure of the book is also of note. It begins with the end, so even though there is a mystery element to it, we know ultimately that Giovanni will be headed to his death. This creates tension that otherwise wouldn’t be there. Creates plenty of questions that aren’t evident from the story when told chronologically. However, after the ending-as-beginning, we dive into David’s teen years, his relationship with his dad, and his first sexual encounter with a boy. While this is good writing and it does develop things for the main character, I quickly lost sight of this chapter; it receded in my memory until it felt like another book altogether, and it made me wonder if it belonged there at all. Fleshing out David’s relationship with his dad and his memories of Joey during the meat of the story would have been more impactful, I think, would have stayed with us better. As a writer, this is exactly the kind of scene that is so difficult to cut—to even see that it needs to be cut—but it’s precisely the kind of darling that needs to go, because while it is part of David’s story as a character (and thematically relevant) it is not part of the story (the narrative) that Baldwin is telling here.

Some of the themes of this book: home, both physical/literal home and also the body as home. Or people. Also, shame. I saw a lot of metaphor with Giovanni’s actual room, with how messy and filthy it was. Dirt=shame. Also, creating a dual life. David is accused, at one point of being “the kind of man who is tempted to put himself in prison in order to avoid being hit by a car.” Officially, David and Giovanni are bisexual, though I don’t think that was the kind of terminology or even category that people were using in the 50s. And honestly, I think David had more of a problem with monogamy and with lying to himself than having a problem with sleeping with women. This is more about transactional sex and with having the freedom to do with one’s own body what one would like to do with one’s own body. Without violence. Without ostracizing. Without having to relinquish all other dreams you might have. While dealing with your own shame and your own judgement.

As for the ending, in our group of twenty or something there were a number of interpretations (though only one hopeful one, and I believe she was hanging on to hope because it suited her, not because it was there in the reading). There is an ending. There is also a lot of space for interpreting the ending. There are clues, like the “dreadful weight of hope” and the tour of the rental house where David keeps apologizing for his messes. (!) But ultimately, even if we feel we can winkle out the direction the story is moving, we don’t know for sure the details of what happens after THE END. It makes it an interesting book for study. It would lead to good discussion in a class. Or in a literary book club. As my buddy Doug cleverly said in discussion, “Your life’s not over, your book’s over.”

So yeah, this was a good book and a short read, an emotional journey full of things to think about. It’s clear and clean and leads to plenty of discussion. I think there are a couple literary missteps but I’m sure there are plenty of readers who would argue those points with me. Also, I could tell the whole time that I was reading great writing, but the subject matter (Bohemian ideals) and setting just wasn’t doing it for me. It’s a classic by a writer’s writer and it’s only 169 pages. Also, if you have suspicions you might be living a lie, perhaps it’s just the right read to make you think while it rips your heart out of your chest for you to examine. I just wouldn’t want to take David as any sort of hero.

James Baldwin was a reader and was not formally trained, but became (and still is) a very respected (and controversial) writer of essays and novels, largely autobiographical about being Black, politics, and sexuality (though not at the same time, which is why all the characters in Giovanni’s Room are white—because race would have confused the themes.) He was born in 1924 in Harlem and died in 1987, an expatriate in France. He had eight siblings, and his mother married a preacher. Baldwin became a preacher as a teenager, but didn’t pursue that as he grew older. He had been writing since he was a child and settled in Greenwich Village where he wrote for journals and magazines. Eventually he moved to Paris and then became a “commuter,” living in New York, New England, France, and Turkey.

His works include:

• Go Tell It on the Mountain
• Giovanni’s Room
• The Fire Next Time
• If Beale Street Could Talk
• Going to Meet the Man (short stories)
• Notes of a Native Son (nonfiction)
• Nobody Knows My Name (nonfiction)
• No Name in the Streets (nonfiction)
• Native Son (nonfiction)

“And these nights were being acted out under a foreign sky, with no one to watch, no penalties attached…” (p5).

“…for nothing is more unbearable, once on has it, than freedom” (p5).

“Fathers ought to avoid utter nakedness before their sons” (p17).

“He wanted no distance between us; he wanted me to look on him as a man like myself. But I wanted the merciful distance of father and son, which would have permitted me to love him” (p17).

“…a real decision makes one humble, one knows that it is at the mercy of more things than can be named—but elaborate systems of evasion, of illusion, designed to make themselves and the world appear to be what they and the world are not” (p20).

“…it takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both” (p25).

“Men—not just babies like you, but old men, too—they always need a woman to tell them the truth” (p69).

“Whether he is with others or not, he is certainly alone” (p113).

“’One of these days,’ he said. ‘Everything bad will happen—one of these days’” (p116).

“Well, isn’t it true? You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back” (p116).

“You do, sometimes, remind me of the kind of man who is tempted to put himself in prison in order to avoid being hit by a car” (p117).

“And at moments like this I felt that we were merely enduring and committing the longer and lesser and more perpetual murder” (p118).

“’It’s cold,’ she said, ‘out here in the Old World.’ / ‘Well. It’s pretty cold out there in the New One, too,’ I said. ‘It’s cold out here, period’” (p134).

“What kind of life can two men have together, anyway?” (p142).

“…it had not occurred to me until that instant that, in fleeing from his body, I confirmed and perpetuated his body’s power over me” (p144).

“’But listen,’ I said to Hella, ‘he was just a disgusting old fairy. That’s all he was!’ / ‘Well, how in the world do you expect the people who read newspapers to know that?’” (p151).

“’There’s a difference between little boys and little girls, just like they say in those little blue books. Little girls want little boys, but little boys—!’ She snapped her compact shut. ‘I’ll never again, as long as I live, know what they want. And now I know they’ll never tell me. I don’t think they know how’” (p165).

“…how you love to be guilty!” (p164).

“I look at my sex, my troubling sex, and wonder how it can be redeemed, how I can save it from the knife” (p168).

“I move at last from the mirror and begin to cover that nakedness which I must hold sacred, though it be never so vile, which must be secured perpetually with the salt of my life. I must believe, I must believe, that the heavy grace of God, which has brought me to this place, is all that can carry me out of it” (p169).