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Holistic Guidance - Giovanni's Room
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List Price: $14.00
Our Price: $11.20
Your Save: $ 2.80 ( 20% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Delta
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780385334587
ISBN: 0385334583
Label: Delta
Manufacturer: Delta
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 176
Publication Date: 2000-06-13
Publisher: Delta
Release Date: 2000-06-13
Studio: Delta
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Editorial Reviews:
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Set in the 1950s Paris of American expatriates, liaisons, and violence, a young man finds himself caught between desire and conventional morality. With a sharp, probing imagination, James Baldwin's now-classic narrative delves into the mystery of loving and creates a moving, highly controversial story of death and passion that reveals the unspoken complexities of the human heart.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: I agree with everthing good about this book
Comment: I read this book about 10+ years ago. I was just going through my books looking for something to read during my commute. When I ran accross this book it was not about what I read 10 years ago it was just a feeling I got. I have started to read this book again and from the first page there was that same feeling again. The yearning and aching feeling of love forbidden and this need to turn page after page knowing that this is a loved that doomed from the onset, but hoping somehow there will happy ending.
Then you realize you are still in real world. I giving this book to my grandaughter.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Good Stuff Doesn't Age, It Matures
Comment: Although advancing in its fifties, Giovanni's Room is a novel which does not get older, it only gets better. It still strikes the reader with the courage and opennes with which James Baldwin tackles his largely unspeakable (at the time of its writing) subject matter. The pains and tortures of search for sexual identity are rendered with real mastery and even if the ending may seem a bow to the demands of an age long gone, it only adds to the psychological truth of the novel. An absolute classic!
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Summary: introspective, subtle, but passionate and full of drama
Comment: "Giovanni's Room", set in Paris of the 1950's, is a memorable study of a tormented soul of a young American, David. Narrated in the first person singular, this novel is deep and dark, making the reader feel the David's emotions and passions.
David, who moved to France like many young Americans after the World War II, to pursue the freedom within the artistic atmosphere and the traditions of the Old World, found in fact the side of himself he did not expect to uncover.
Starting the story at the point of total exhaustion, on the verge of madness, just about to leave the South of France for Paris again (and then, perhaps, finally to return to the States - although the ending is open in this respect) David recollects his relationship with Giovanni, an Italian barman whom he met on the night while searching for money to pay his hotel bill (or for another accommodation). When Hella, David's girlfriend, travels in Spain trying to organize her thoughts far from David and get to know herself better in solitude, David decides to ask Jacques, a man he knew casually, for money. Jacques invites him for dinner and then they end up going for a couple of drinks to the gay bar. Jacques is a friend of the owner, Guillaume, and they abandon themselves in a conversation, although Jacques clearly fancies the young barman. When two older men leave them alone, David and Giovanni immediately feel attracted to each other and by the morning they go together to Giovanni's room, where David subsequently moves. Guillaume, who gave Giovanni the job in hope to win the boy's heart, is very jealous; Jacques is also a bit upset, but both of them hope that the relationship won't last.
Well... the relationship does not last, and this is the information revealed at the very beginning of the novel. David is, all in all, a disagreeable character (another novel in which the main character is not likeable, yet evoking sympathy in the reader because of his complexity and misery, and certainly possessing some charm, which he uses without scruples), who acts egoistically and opportunistically, but also according to convention. By being selfish and cruel to those who love him, he destroys not only them, but also himself. He cannot accept his love for Giovanni, because he fights his gay tendencies (he cannot even think about himself as gay and always tries to distinguish himself from "old fairies" like Guillaume and Jacques), but when he finally gives in, it is too late to rescue the relationship. Here lies, for me, the universal message in the story: what happens if by our own silliness, mistake, carelessness, or hard-headedness, whatever, we lose the love of our life and, worse, have an utterly destructive influence on him or her?
Giovanni is a great character, he is a complete opposite of David - he follows his instincts to the point of abandoning himself in them, at the same time doing it completely unconsciously - he is convinced that he acts very rationally and has reasonable plans for the future. When David leaves him upon Hella's return to Paris, Giovanni loses all the grip onto reality and that leads to the tragedy.
Hella, the only significant female character in the novel (except marginal, although complex, Sue, who is another person in the collection of people used by David) is also very interesting - basically, David treats her exactly the same as he treats Giovanni, but she is much more down-to earth and with typical American self- control manages to get back on her feet.
The story takes place in Paris, the protagonist breathes the existentialis atmosphere, wandering in the narrow, old streets during the night. His desperation does not prevent him from perceiving the beauty of the city, but at the same time the city adds to his melancholy. In a different setting the story would undoubtedly be different, and so the novel seamlessly connects its time, place and plot.
James Baldwin created a remarkable novel, full of introspective, universal questions that never get outdated. He managed to write about the problems, which at his time were rather hidden and unspoken. Very subtle prose and concise form round up the list of "Giovanni's Room's" qualities. This is the first book by this author I have read and I will definitely try more.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A Masterpiece
Comment: Giovanni's Room is such a poignant, touching, and finely crafted novel that deals with homosexuality, love, and death in a way that one rarely finds in one. The characters, each and every single one of them, are as real as anybody today in the 21st century. The emotions described in the book are so real and vivid that the novel rarely reads like a novel. A touching story, sharp social commentary, and a very vivid view of what homosexuality was like back in the 1960's in Paris.
Customer Rating:
Summary: An affair of the heart threatened by society's "clutter and disorder"
Comment: "Giovanni's Room" is unique among Baldwin's novels for its all-white cast of characters--a decision that, his letters revealed, worried Baldwin somewhat, fearing that his portrayals would not seem authentic. His concerns turned out to be baseless; both Giovanni and David are convincing characters whose magnetism and flawed idealism stand in sharp relief to the cynical, grimy atmosphere of the bars and rooms they inhabit.
David is engaged to be married when his fiancee, Hella, travels to Spain to "find out" what she wants from life--and from David. He then meets Giovanni in a Parisian bar and their fate is sealed as soon as they enter Giovanni's tiny, claustrophobic room and its "outlines of clutter and disorder." David's internal struggle begins immediately: "if I do not open the door at once and get out of here, I am lost. But I knew I could not open the door, I knew it was too late."
I've come to think of Baldwin's "Giovanni's Room" as the inverted (no pun intended) example of Forster's "Room with a View," the book it oddly and inexplicably reminds me of. Although Baldwin is tragic where Forster is comic, the impossible coupling of stalwart David and carefree Giovanni echo the equally improbable pair of straitlaced Lucy and bohemian George. And in each novel, the foreign setting strips away David's and Lucy's inhibitions while it enhances Giovanni's and George's forwardness.
Both books, too, deal with a typically nineteenth-century theme, pitting moral honesty and romantic love against what "proper" society expects of its members. David is expected to marry Hella, as Lucy is expected to marry Cecil, and the comic or tragic outcome of each novel is determined entirely by the sincerity of the choices made by its characters. In Baldwin's more modern version, however, the virtue of David and Giovanni's relationship and the (yes) innocence of their love cannot ultimately withstand the pressures of society and the strictures of David's upbringing, and, inexorably, the couple become as sullied as the "clutter and disorder" of Giovanni's room.
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