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A review by zmoats
Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin
5.0
When you declare a book one of your favorites, and you return to it after some time, you just hope it can live up to that title you once gave it. You know you'll read things different than you did at one time. That difference in the perception as you change is one of the beauties of rereading books.
I am far enough removed from the first time I read Giovanni's Room that I didn't immediately recall what I felt making my way through the book the first time. James Baldwin is such a visceral writer though, he has this means of using language to crack you open. Almost as if you can feel him doing just the same on the other end of the pen.
I don't see much of a need to go on about how Giovanni's room in the novel becomes a metaphor for the way the world outside the room turns that very sanctuary to a prison. That has been written and analyzed by people far smarter than I. What always keeps me coming back to Baldwin though isn't just his ability to write so incisively about feeling. It's this ache. An ache that seems so omnipresent across his work. Sometimes that ache manifests itself in righteous anger, sometimes in despair, and sometimes in jubilance. But it never goes away. It seems contradictory to juxtapose that amorphous feeling against the specific emotionality of his writing, but that's exactly what it so enthralling. I'm not sure that dichotomy is laid bare more beautifully, plainly, or painfully than it is in Giovanni's Room.
I am far enough removed from the first time I read Giovanni's Room that I didn't immediately recall what I felt making my way through the book the first time. James Baldwin is such a visceral writer though, he has this means of using language to crack you open. Almost as if you can feel him doing just the same on the other end of the pen.
I don't see much of a need to go on about how Giovanni's room in the novel becomes a metaphor for the way the world outside the room turns that very sanctuary to a prison. That has been written and analyzed by people far smarter than I. What always keeps me coming back to Baldwin though isn't just his ability to write so incisively about feeling. It's this ache. An ache that seems so omnipresent across his work. Sometimes that ache manifests itself in righteous anger, sometimes in despair, and sometimes in jubilance. But it never goes away. It seems contradictory to juxtapose that amorphous feeling against the specific emotionality of his writing, but that's exactly what it so enthralling. I'm not sure that dichotomy is laid bare more beautifully, plainly, or painfully than it is in Giovanni's Room.