Giovanni’s room — James Baldwin
This story starts at the end. The main character, David, is in front of a window at a house in the South of France along with his girlfriend Hella, thinking about the past few months in Paris, the night before “the most terrible morning” of his life. From then on, David will take us to the past and tell us what it was like growing up in Brooklyn with his father, a good-natured although detached man, and his aunt, who moves in with them after the death of David’s mother when he was five years old.
He also recounts his first experience with a man during his teenage years, with his friend Joey, and his subsequent need to deny it and flee. The same need that will take him to Paris years later, where he will meet Giovanni. The attraction is instant. We are in France in the 1950s where, unlike in the United States, homosexuality is legal even though the social stigma persists. Only inside Giovanni’s room can they be safe, but that will not last long.
David’s character will not make things any easier. He is a good-looking and amiable 26-year-old who keeps everyone at a distance, who is a little immature and careless with the feelings of the people around him. A young man that does everything in his power to deny his identity, and whose attempt at hiding it will end up hurting those who love him the most.
This book was controversial since its publication in 1956 not only because it dealt with a homosexual relationship, but because this was a black author writing about white characters. The main theme of the works of James Baldwin was the African American experience in the United States, but when he was asked why in this case none of his characters were black, he answered that it would have been too much to also tackle the issue of racism in a book that already openly discussed the issue of sexuality. Again, these were the 50s.
James Baldwin was born in the neighborhood of Harlem in New York City in 1924 and moved to France when he was 24 — where he would live most of his life — due in big part to the emotional distress caused by the constant racial discrimination he experienced while living in the United States. It is not difficult to see that Giovanni’s room was a deeply personal book for him. That David was perhaps partially inspired in the Swiss artist Lucien Happersberger, with whom Baldwin had a complicated relationship. That the ruminations about living abroad, longing for home, and how Americans are perceived were probably similar to those he had when he arrived in Paris with only 40 dollars in his pocket.
At the core of this story lies the reluctance to accept a part of your identity due to fear of rejection from society. With his clever and elegant style, clear but poetic, close to stream-of-consciousness sometimes, Baldwin immerses us in the mind of someone who hates who he is because society has told him that what he feels is not natural. But reading about David and Giovanni, you cannot help but notice how well they fit together, how naturally their relationship evolves. From their first exchanged words, timid but teasing, to the inevitable fate of falling in love perhaps too much too fast. This love story is a tragedy that should have never ended as such.
This review was originally published in Spanish at Cuaderno Reciclado.
