In Giovanni's Room, Baldwin Holds the Reader Captive for a Night and Beckons You to Listen.

It’s some time in the night. Hella is somewhere overseas. Giovanni, in jail awaiting execution. And David is by himself contemplating the events that led to all of their fates, and what his hand in all of it could be.

Baldwin packs a life lived and a handful of characters' experiences into a single night, into 170 pages, and sets a pact with the reader to stand for the narrator's testimony to the events that ensued when decisions were made and unmade where bodies could not be just as easily unmade. One thing remains true to the reader and this man who holds you random to his lamentations; you already know the foreboding grim ending, but you will stick around to see to its conclusion. David manages to tell a moving tale of love, heartbreak and the battles that take place inside all of us on our quest for self.

Giovanni’s Room is an important book to read, and not an easy one at that because for most queer* people reading it, especially gay men, it somewhat reads like an intrusive account of not just David or Giovanni or Jacques and the men who’ve touched them and been touched by them, but every other gay men who’s ever existed. It is transcendent. It is a gorgeous portrayal of the cataclysmic happenings that arise from one man’s inability to exist the way he should brought on by society’s impositions. David’s greatest crisis is not that he is attracted to men, it is the struggle of accepting and embracing it; hence he exists between two worlds, belonging to neither fully.

The book isn’t about Giovanni, more than it is about David’s journey and the part he plays in it - as important as that part is. The same thing can be said about Giovanni’s room, the physical space, and how it is a representation of the place where David fully fathoms the extent of his self-deception and the actions he continues to take to hold up the facade.

The book touches on themes such as gender, sexuality and race, as well as family, the idea of home and the search for self; and just as obviously blatant is the theme of identity and how it merges and intersects with all the others.

I honestly feel like everyone should read this book at some point in their life. It is important that they do, and not just to critique it, but for the experience. It’s one of those books where you just cannot take a person’s word for it.