Giovanni's Room

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An agonizingly good story of a man struggling with the ideas of who he is and what he wants in life. In Giovanni's Room, Baldwin tells the tale of David, an American in 1950's Paris who finds himself revisiting past desires from his youth, with a newly found friend- Giovanni, an Italian barman. Over the course of this short novel, we watch David become complete and fall apart as he vacillates between his lover and a woman, to whom he has proposed marriage. This was wonderfully written and it is the first book of Baldwin's I've read, but certainly not the last.

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I was reminded of Giovanni's Room when it appeared on Powells list of 25 Books to Read Before You Die. I'd read Giovanni's Room years ago, along with just about every word written by James Baldwin to find it's way to publication, and found it to be all that I first loved and more - truly a bucket-list novel if you haven't already read it, and a must re-read if you have. On the back cover of my current copy (Vintage International Trade Paperback Edition, September 2013), Michael Ondaatje summed up James Baldwin's influence on contemporary culture, writing, "If Van Gogh was our 19th-century artist-saint, James Baldwin is our 20th-century one." Indeed, James Baldwin is, in many ways, the 20th-century version of Van Gogh, an artist who changed the way we see art in the western world by offering mind-opening impressions rather than pure representations of his subjects which were, in turn, humble - the people, places, and objects that populated the lives of ordinary people who were regarded, at last, as worthy of a place in the world of high art in the modern, post-feudal world. Like Van Gogh, Baldwin drew our attentions to lives lived on the margins of the known world in the 20th century as they were just beginning their push toward the center, and all while the center was disintegrating. In Giovanni's Room, he broke new ground, telling a story of queer love and the destructive force of bigotry and internalized self-hatred. Baldwin challenged us to step into the post-modern age, to embrace the specificity of experience beyond class and oppressive gender norms. James Baldwin's voice is prophetic, lyrical, emotional, riveting us to every page, right down to the last word. In the post-Stonewall era, Giovanni's Room has taken on new meaning. It reads as historical fiction, a reminder of who we once were and how far we have come on a humanizing journey that the whole of Baldwin's oeuvre suggests is never-ending. Instead, to consciously embrace the journey beginning with accepting ourselves as inseparable from the "other" is the first act of humanization, the flip side of which is the process of reducing ourselves to less than we are or could be that results from separating us from them, as though these ideas are, in fact, descriptive of distinct and separable wholes.