Giovanni's Room

This was not on my normal literary diet of fantasy and sci-fi.

It is a hard book to admit to enjoying because the young homophobic male that lives inside this sixty-year old body wants to run and hide from a story speaking frankly about homosexuality.

It took me a long time to read this relatively short novel because this book is a rollercoaster of emotions and when I was at the crest of the emotional arc I often needed to put the book aside because of the dread I felt for David (the protagonist).

I don’t see any point in discussing this book in detail other than to say as many have said before me: read this book because to me it is a portal to a new appreciation of what a book can achieve.

I’ll let the notes and quotes I collected do the rest of the talking.

• “Behind the counter sat one of those absolutely inimitable and indomitable ladies, produced only in the city of Paris, but produced there in great numbers, who would be as outrageous and unsettling in any other city as a mermaid on a mountaintop. All over Paris they sit behind their counters like a mother bird in a nest and brood over the cash register as though it were an egg.

• (this melancholy tone, it hurts so good) “She seems, like most of the women down here, to have gone into mourning directly the last child moved out of childhood. Hella thought that they were all widows, but, it turned out, most of them had husbands living yet. These husbands might have been their sons.”

• “I REMEMBER THAT LIFE in that room seemed to be occurring beneath the sea. Time flowed past indifferently above us; hours and days had no meaning. In the beginning, our life together held a joy and amazement which was newborn every day. Beneath the joy, of course, was anguish and beneath the amazement was fear; but they did not work themselves to the beginning until our high beginning was aloes on our tongues. ”

• “I cannot say that I was frightened. Or, it would be better to say that I did not feel any fear—the way men who are shot do not, I am told, feel any pain for awhile. I felt a certain relief.”

• Nothing to quote here. But the scene where Giovanni meets Hella is excruciating and I need to take a break.

• “I’m beginning to see,” I said, carefully, “that kids like Giovanni are in a difficult position. This isn’t, you know, the land of opportunity—there’s no provision made for them. Giovanni’s poor, I mean he comes from poor folks, and there isn’t really much that he can do. And for what he can do, there’s terrific competition. And, at that, very little money, not enough for them to be able to think of building any kind of future. That’s why so many of them wander the streets and turn into gigolos and gangsters and God knows what.”

• “He did not smile, he was neither grave, nor vindictive, nor sad; he was still. He was waiting, I think, for me to cross that space and take him in my arms again—waiting, as one waits at a deathbed for the miracle one dare not disbelieve, which will not happen. I had to get out of there for my face showed too much, the war in my body was dragging me down. My feet refused to carry me over to him again. The wind of my life was blowing me away.”

• “When one walked through the gardens, leaves fell about one’s head and sighed and crashed beneath one’s feet. The stone of the city, which had been luminous and changing, faded slowly, but with no hesitation, into simple grey stone again. It was apparent that the stone was hard. ”

• “It is hard to say what produced this melancholy, which sometimes settled over us like the shadow of some vast, some predatory, waiting bird. I do not think that Hella was unhappy, for I had never before clung to her as I clung to her during that time. But perhaps she sensed, from time to time, that my clutch was too insistent to be trusted, certainly too insistent to last.”

• “And Giovanni, during this short encounter, in the middle of the boulevard as dusk fell, with people hurrying all about us, was really amazingly giddy and girlish, and very drunk—it was as though he were forcing me to taste the cup of his humiliation. And I hated him for this.”

• “And told us, too, in delicious detail, how he had done it: but not why. Why was too black for the newsprint to carry and too deep for Giovanni to tell.”

• “Then Guillaume enters and Giovanni tries to smile. They have a drink. Guillaume is precipitate, flabby, and moist, and, with each touch of his hand, Giovanni shrinks further and more furiously away.”

• “My lips were cold. I felt nothing on my lips. She kissed me again and I closed my eyes, feeling that strong chains were dragging me to fire. It seemed that my body, next to her warmth, her insistence, under her hands, would never awaken. But when it awakened, I had moved out of it. From a great height, where the air all around me was colder than ice, I watched my body in a stranger’s arms.”