Self hate, love and eating cherries - Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin

 

Giovanni asks David "ne me laisse pas tomber, je t'en prie' and I remember the two former loved ones in the early days of love and I say oh rass man James Baldwin.

Giovanni Room is a love story which begins at the end with the main man David getting ready to leave the house where he is staying. Baldwin lets you know up front that the story is not going to have a happy ending.

David is kicked out of his room. He is an American in Paris. His girlfriend Hella is in Spain.  David meets Giovanni and is attracted though he is not sure of the attraction.  It is the 1950s and the identities of gay/bisexual/homosexual/MSM have not been demarcated. Giovanni tells him they will be friends . Giovanni had also left his girlfriend in Italy.

Two men loving/liking each other in Baldwin's France is not going to be easy.

David/Baldwin describes the people in the bar where he first met Giovanni - like him and not like him..

with the description of the grotesque with the reference back to the self.

David of course has decided he will leave Giovanni when Hella comes back.

"“For I am—or I was—one of those people who pride themselves in on their willpower, on their ability to make a decision and carry it through. This virtue, like most virtues, is ambiguity itself. People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception. Their decisions are not really decisions at all—a real decision makes one humble, one knows that it is at the mercy of more things than can be named—but elaborate systems of evasion, of illusion, designed to make themselves and the world appear to be what they and the world are not. This is certainly what my decision, made so long ago in Joey’s bed, came to. I had decided to allow no room in the universe for something which shamed and frightened me. I succeeded very well—by not looking at the universe, by not looking at myself, by remaining, in effect, in constant motion.”

 David falls out of love with Hella and the story ends unhappily ever after as do many love stories between men, and between men and women.

But there are moments of love and happiness like when eating cherries and throwing them at each other..

"Giovanni had awakened an itch, had released a gnaw in me. I realized it one afternoon, when I was taking him to work via the Boulevard Montparnasse. We had bought a kilo of cherries and we were eating them as we walked along. We were both insufferably childish and high-spirited that afternoon and the spectacle we presented, two grown men jostling each other on the wide sidewalk and aiming the cherry pits, as though they were spitballs, into each other's faces, must have been outrageous. And I realized that such childishness was fantastic at my age and the happiness out of which it sprang yet more so; for that moment I really loved Giovanni, who had never seemed more beautiful than he was that afternoon.”

The whole book can be quoted - Baldwin's language is like a sharp breeze which has you feeling refreshed and invigorated but leaves you cold cold.

The book is highly recommended. I read it three times.