Giovanni's Room

It was impossible not to feel Baldwin speaking in some of the lines of his writing. The poetic metaphors and vivid writing made for an effortless movie playing in my head throughout the whole novel. His opinions of Paris, the people, the time period, the relationships between American expatriates and locals were woven into a story about how two men so unavoidably different yet so alarmingly yearning for the same thing, fall in love with all the complexities we humans bring into every single one of our relationships. The fact that I wanted to strangle David by the end of the book is intentional but Baldwin crafts him to be a mirror of the guilt and shame he experienced as a gay man so incredibly uncomfortable in his own body, not knowing how to find intimacy-true selfish, without a doubt intimacy-with another man.