Book tip

Here comes a book which is worth reading any month: James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room.

Giovanni‘s Room was published in 1956, after Baldwin’s first publisher rejected the manuscript

some ten years before the Stone Wall Riots. His agent had told him to burn the manuscript and

never mention it again. Which he of course did not and how could he burn a book about tragically

denying your true feelings?

There was much too much of himself contained within the text. Drinking away the nights in

Parisian gay bars, was actually quite close to his own life during the early 50s. Similarly, Baldwin

too, met and fell in love with a younger man while drunk on wine and good company. It is this man

to whom Giovanni’s Room is dedicated. But most work – author parallels end there. As opposed to

his main character, James Baldwin himself is neither white nor particularly sexually repressed. Yet

he still struggled with everything portrayed in his work, and the author ultimately managed what the

character could not.

This realism and experience shines through in every aspect of the novel. The city of Paris is dirty

and full of poverty and the various bars are often bleak, dark and rarely seen in any glamour. It’s

inhabitants are constantly using one another, be it for money, pleasure or just to feel better about

themselves. It’s almost surprising that anyone could find love in such a place.

Of course you wouldn’t seek love under such circumstances. David, a white American awaiting his

fiancé’s return from a vacation in Spain, after which they plan on getting married and staying in the

USA; is merely killing time in the various gay bars he frequents. That is, until he meets Giovanni

and falls in love with him.

And finally, ends up forsaking him, choosing what his father and the rest of the world expect of him

over his and Giovanni’s happiness. It is exactly this tragic inner conflict, that is at the core of

Giovanni’s Room. Through this struggle it manages to convey an understandable, though perhaps

incomplete, picture of the fear of both oneself as well as being othered. This focus on the personal

and internal battles is also what makes Giovanni’s Room a classic, which doesn’t lose any of its

relevancy, no matter the progress we both celebrate and fight for in our annual Pride Month.