# Reading > Write a Book Review >  Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin

## kelby_lake

I thought this book was brilliant. Sad and beautiful, landmark book. :Bawling:  It ought to get far more mention. The fact that it's set in Paris makes it even more romantic. This is a book you'll want to read many times- clever, compassionate and well-written.

Score: 9/10

----------


## kelby_lake

has no-one read it?!

----------


## kelby_lake

Brilliant radio adaptation on BBC 3 yesterday.

----------


## keilj

> has no-one read it?!


I might give it a try. The only Baldwin book I ever tried was If Beale Street Could Talk - and it really turned me off to him as a writer. In Beale Street, the narrator was very rough and street level - and I was just not in the mood to read that kind of prose

----------


## OrphanPip

Baldwin is interesting in the fact that he straddled the African American civil rights movement and the pre-Stonewall sexual liberation movement. I think he's best remembered as one of the early writers to give African Americans a voice in literature.

Giovanni's Room is a good novel though, academics seem to make a big to-do about Baldwin's choice to write his bisexual story about white people in France. I'm rereading it in the next week or so, it's on a pile of queer lit I'm working through, I'll post some thoughts when it's fresher in my mind after a re-read. I'm currently trying to broaden my knowledge of primarily queer writing done by women, but I got Giovanni's Room in the pile to keep me grounded in the familiar  :Wink: .

----------


## kelby_lake

> I might give it a try. The only Baldwin book I ever tried was If Beale Street Could Talk - and it really turned me off to him as a writer. In Beale Street, the narrator was very rough and street level - and I was just not in the mood to read that kind of prose


This narrator is the opposite of that.

----------


## Sadijara

I had the pleasure of meeting James Baldwin at a place called Enrico's on Broadway in San Francisco...and actually discussed the book with him. I loved it and read it from the time I was about 10 (it was in my mother's bookcase) and would go back to it off and on again for the next 15 years when i wanted a tearjerker. You do know that one of the characters is James (loosely based) and can you guess which one? I wanted to buy the screenrights to it but someone beat me to it. Can you guess who? It was Madonna years ago. When I first read it I couldnt really understand the homosexuality theme but as I got older I understood it and deeply so. What a sad and tragic story. It was so simply told, yet it was very deep with such complicated characters. I must get another copy! For out of all his books, that is the only one that touched my soul and got me bi-curious as to what makes people tick.

----------


## OrphanPip

I decided to include my thoughts on this in a blog post, but I'll copy paste the blog post here as well.

http://www.online-literature.com/for...og.php?b=11144

Along with Gore Vidal's The City and the Pillar, Baldwin's Giovanni's Room is one of the most widely read of gay literature, probably the most widely read by heterosexuals. However, it has long been a problematic text for gay readers, particularly gay African American readers.

Baldwin was actively involved with the civil rights movement, but shied away from the gay rights movement. He proudly fought along the lines of African American identity politics, was involved in forming a positive image of African Americans, but his one gay novel does little to affirm homosexuality. To put it succinctly, Baldwin has often been accused of being a self-deprecating homosexual, and guilty of perpetuating negative stereotypes. Nonetheless, he was still one of few major American authors to tackle the issue.

For those unfamiliar with the novel. It is about the affair of a white American, David, with a young Italian man, Giovanni, while living in Paris. David has money issues, and ends up living in Giovanni's room, though of course the room itself is a symbolic representation of the containment of David's homosexual desire. The typical psychoanalytical interpretation involved in the liminal spaces and liminal character that David is. He's never grounded, he's in transition, and the homosexual is a liminal person. I don't like to spoil endings, but things don't turn out so well for David, and especially bad for Giovanni.

Personally, I'm not one to trash Baldwin's effort in this novel. He tries to put forward an argument against the repression of homosexuals, he tries to show suffering as a result of the lack of acceptance. Nonetheless, I have to admit that Baldwin is hardly the most enlightened of gay writers, he displays a lot of resentment and negativity towards homosexuality. In large part I'm willing to forgive this because it is a first person narrative in David's voice, and he is the epitome of the self-loathing homosexual. The troubling implication is that this is the book that is the most widely read by heterosexuals and is often encountered early on by homosexuals looking through gay literature, it's probably not the best novel if we're concerned with the social implications. It's another one of those gay novels that perpetuated the image of the permanently unhappy gay man, there really rarely is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow in gay lit.

The most striking criticism I've come across has come from African American gays. Many of who resent Baldwin's unwillingness to directly tackle the issue of black gays. An issue largely erased historically, unmentioned and impossible to admit to a public discourse at the time so heavily concerned with establishing the legitimacy of African Americans at the time. Instead, Baldwin chose to write his novel about white people, in fact he establishes the whiteness of his narrator from the very first page. Some, have argued rather convincingly that the characters are subtly codified as black anyway, and say that the novel really does say something very controversial by rendering the issues of race and sexuality ambiguous. Though, it doesn't help to ablate the subtle resentment of what is perceived as a lack of courage by Baldwin to tackle the issue of the duel hardships, of racism and homophobia, that black gays faced in the 60s.

Ultimately, if we remove the novel from its social and political implications, we're left with a rather convincing narrative of an individual in conflict with social expectation and his desire to fulfill them, and in many ways it's a rather conventional tragedy as it is his desire to remain socially acceptable that is his undoing. The novel is tightly structured, and Baldwin shows his usual love of symbolism. It's a good novel, even if I sometimes worry over the impression it might give to young gay readers. Moreover, just because of how widely read it is, it's nearly impossible to ignore for anyone interested in LGBT literature.

----------


## kelby_lake

Maurice is a positive gay love story. The film is great  :Biggrin:

----------


## MANICHAEAN

I read "Go Tell It On The Mountain" back in the 60's. Most probably did not really understand all the gay stuff then. Not sure I do now! But I thoroughly enjoyed the sensitivity of the way Baldwin wrote. After that "Giovanni's Room" was a delight.

----------


## OrphanPip

> Maurice is a positive gay love story. The film is great


Forster never published it though.

There are some unfortunate implications of that novel as well, but it is, probably, more progressive than Baldwin's.

----------


## sixsmith

I think it is both incorrect and unfair to assert that Baldwin lacked artistic courage. Indeed, he _did_ address the dual hardships of being black and being gay: he simply did not address both (at least not overtly) in _Giovanni's Room_. There are, I suspect, artistic reasons for his choosing not to do so. In any event, the fact that David is not black is in no way germane to an assessment of the novel's aesthetic merit, which I judge to be considerable. Doubtless, the allegory is a little heavy handed (aren't they all) and as Pip says, it is ultimately a rather conventional tragedy. But the novel contains scenes of genuine power and Baldwin displays real insight into the folly of self deception/denial and the anguish that attends it

----------


## kelby_lake

> Forster never published it though.


Of course not. Homosexuality was illegal in Britain until 1967. And it is now published.

I suppose they could read Women in Love, for that epic wrestling scene.

----------


## OrphanPip

> Of course not. Homosexuality was illegal in Britain until 1967. And it is now published.
> 
> I suppose they could read Women in Love, for that epic wrestling scene.


Yes, but it weakens the impact of Maurice that it is predated by a large number of gay themed writing beforehand.

----------

