Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin

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For some reason it has taken a while to get around to reading this, despite it regularly being referenced in other books I have been reading – is there something about such a classic that makes you shy away from it, that warning about not meeting your heroes perhaps?

What difference does reading this have in 2021 compared with those encountering it when first published a decade before decriminalisation in the UK. There is a sense of the lives within it being constrained and a little sordid, but 60 years ago the fact that such lives could even exist would have been a liberation.

Form this I come to the question of whether any of them are likable? But then again there is no need for them to be likeable ...

Various things I have been reading that mention Giovanni’s Room make a significant point that Baldwin is writing about White people – but I was left wondering why we assume David is White, does it actually say that, I don’t recall it doing so - or is it the case that because it isn't mentioned we just assume? If David was Black you would have to say so? Does reading David as Black or White impact the narrative, if it does how? And why?

One of the drivers of the narrative is the fact that Hella is so desperate to get married, it is the entry point to adult life, especially for her as a women, in a way that I don’t think is true any more. She can only find a valid identity as an adult women by becoming someone's wife. This is why the cut of David’s betrayal of her goes so deep.

It seems to me that it is not the sex but the moment when Giovanni is crying that is the biggest challenge to masculinity – and despite so much in society having moved on from the world of the late 1950s one thing that is still toxicly true is that “real” men don’t cry.

That Giovanni has run away from his wife and still born child is a complicated back story – that is a trauma from which we can be sympathetic to his desire to flea – but what must be the situation for his wife, in the grief for their child she is abandoned by him – whatever struggles Giovanni is facing it feels that she will be facing tougher ones.

Finally, I will admit that I in my mind I picture him as Giovanni from Strictly – but I don’t think he would be a bad fit for casting.