Uncharted Books

Giovanni’s Room is a novel about a man caught between his love for a man and a woman. David, an American, who has come to Paris to try to find himself. His girlfriend Hella is in Spain trying to decide whether she wants to marry him. All the while David is out of funds and his father is willing to let him suffer a bit in the hopes that he will come back home to the States. David meets Giovanni from a friend, Jacques, whom he is borrowing money from due to his money insecurity and Jacques is a very wealthy man. David and Giovanni hit it off and over the course of a few months their relationship gets deeper and more intricate. The love between the pair is almost unrequited with David confused and still connected to Hella. When Hella finally comes back from Spain and back to David, the downward spiral that was inevitable comes to fruition.

What Baldwin achieves is a desperate account of two gay-or-bisexual men struggling with their sexuality, their society, and most importantly their identities: identities which are at once masculine and yet deprived of that masculinity by their complicity with a society that doesn’t understand them. The acceptance of LGBTQ+ individuals was not nearly what it is like today, people were abused, looked down upon, and sometimes killed for loving the people they wanted to. Baldwin’s real achievement is to make his story universal. The way that Baldwin refuses to let his novel be about gay men in love, and instead makes it about two people in love shows that this disconnect that people have between homo/heterosexuality is ludicrous: people should be allowed to love whoever they want with no transgression. The love between Giovanni and David is not a “homosexual love” or “same sex love” – it’s just love, and Baldwin tells us that is all love needs to be to be real.

To say Giovanni’s Room is just a gay novel certainly is not an attempt to disparage the book, but it does seem to limit the scope of the vision. There is viciousness, lust, loneliness, deception, sorrow, tenderness, despair, and ultimately tragedy that makes this book so gripping and necessary. This is an ugly book, it makes you feel disgusted by your own patterns and thoughts. Every reader will find something of themselves in this book, not the part of themselves they want to show the world, but certainly a piece, disdainful in nature or worthy of pity, that can’t be ignored.

This book is much more than a novel about a man struggling with his sexuality, it is about love, loss, fear, identity, and loneliness. I came into this book expecting something much different, I have never read James Baldwin so I did not know what to expect. What came out of it was a deeper understanding for people apart of the LGBTQ+ community, people in loveless relationships, people engaged in affairs, people who never get to find love and the concept of loving oneself. For all of these reasons I think that this book would be more than acceptable to teach students, probably not in a high school setting but most definitely a college course.

James Baldwin is a very accomplished writer, playwright and essayist, one of which I have never heard of before finding this novel. James was open about his sexuality with both men and women throughout his lifetime and believed sexuality is more fluid and less binary as expressed in the US. Writing about the black experience in America is what through James Baldwin into the conversations as one of the best writers of the time. Baldwin made his voice prominent in the Civil Rights movement through many of his essays, taking a front seat through writing instead of marching. I am happy to have found his work and definitely will want to read more of his novels, poems and essays in the future to further educate myself.