A review by maxgardner
Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin

challenging dark emotional reflective sad medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Well, this book absolutely destroyed me. Giovanni's Room is my first Baldwin, and it's beautifully written with characters that feel unique, but still real and well developed. I suppose there's no way this could have been a happy story considering it's about queer people in the 1950s, and really the brutality of the story reflects how dark and bleak life was for them at that time; primarily, Baldwin focuses on gay men and life from their perspective through the eyes of the main character, David. First of all, this story was illuminating for me because it provides a window into queer life 70 years ago. Obviously this story is fiction, but its core themes and many of David's experiences are drawn from Baldwin's life. It's fascinating to see, aside from some obvious differences with the times, just how many parallels there are between the struggles young queer people faced then and what they face now. Doubt, denial, disgust, self hate, suicidal thoughts and ideation, living this odd double life where you indulge your desires while simultaneously disassociating, seeing your actions as other from your identity, wishing you could be "normal" and maybe even trying to be in spite of the lack that life will leave you with. In true form to the queer experience, reading this book both gave me comfort in relating to this specific experience, to what feel like my people, and broke my heart knowing what that experience must have been like.

For a fairly short book, Giovanni's Room packs a huge punch and is a gold mine for literary analysis. Baldwin, in spite of having pretty terse prose, weaves these beautiful themes and motifs throughout that all intersect and complement each other. The idea of home as this place David wants to return to yet has never actually had in the sense of what he yearns for, the theme of otherness and lack of identity that David feels in how he's perceived as a foreigner and as a straight man, the violence of masculinity and self-repression, among so many others. The text is so rich with all of these really well thought out ideas, and I think that is in large part due to Baldwin's intrinsic understanding of what it feels like to be a gay man and to have lived with those struggles. Obviously there's imagination on display here in crafting these characters, but the depth of the story comes from a place of real pain and experience. This is a masterwork from Baldwin, and it seems like he is the only one who could have told this story.

This book made me feel nerdy again and want to write an essay. I can't wait to read it again in the future and see what new insights I can mine from it.
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