Book Review: Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin

The book review is going to be incredibly challenging to write, because I still have little idea exactly how I feel about Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin. I didn’t know what it was about before starting the novel; I only picked it up because I loved Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk and wanted to read more of him. So I had no idea that Giovanni’s room was going to be an extended metaphor for the central relationship, the singular metaphor probably being my favorite part of the book. 

I think the main complaint I have with this novel is that our protagonists are not well drawn. I never completely understood who David, Giovanni, or Hella were. Baldwin’s prose was well-written, but the character depth was lacking, and the dialogue felt unnatural and oftentimes obscure or incomprehensible for me. There were a lot of French phrases scattered about, and I didn’t care enough to look up a translation. I think there were some good lines in here and some good ideas, but I could never connect to the characters.

The last fight between Giovanni and David was the best and most emotionally charged scene of the novel. I understood them both much more in that scene than in any other, but since there wasn’t any development up to that point, it wasn’t exactly a pay off. 

Scattered throughout the novel were depictions of depraved older men seeking out poor, obviously unwilling, younger men prostituting themselves, which was disturbing and uncomfortable, which was also the point, I know. It was an uncomfortable self-realization that I had become desensitized to similar depictions about women forced into prostitution, and somehow the gender flip that isn’t as commonly portrayed in media made it that much more real and renewed the discomfort.  

Fun fact: I had forgotten that France was still using the guillotine as capital punishment up until the 1970’s, and this book reminded me of that.