steventoast's Book Journey

okay so the writing is exquisite, classic baldwin. MC has some deeply internalized homophobia to work through which feels tied to religion. this is gonna break me isn’t it? 😭🙏🏾

“I did not want him to know me. I did not want anyone to know me.”

this comforted me and then made me sad because it comforted me

"if you cannot love me, I will die. Before you came I wanted to die, I have told you many times. It is cruel to have made me want to live only to make my death more bloody."

I don't think I'll ever recover from this

Ok, I’m an eternal optimist. So I have maybe a “hot take” on that ending. The ending is, of course, devastating. The execution of Giovanni and the fact that David does not attend? Shattering. The idea that Giovanni was so devastated that he possibly committed suicide unintentionally by murdering someone? Horrifying.

But there is something to be said about the break up with Hella. I honestly expected this book to end mostly how it did. Of course we would lose Giovanni, David would be heartbroken, etc…. But I also expected him to enter a loveless marriage with Hella. By dumping him, Hella not only saved herself, but saved him. I don’t know if David will ever get over his shame, especially after what happened with Giovanni. But there’s a small part of me that acknowledges that he’s still free at the end of the novel. There’s a chance that he’s a (fairly) young man, and he may not end up like Jacques. He may find another love, and find his way out of the closet or the metaphorical Giovanni‘s room. I kind of love the beauty of the open-endedness of his story. Realistically, there’s a chance that he never finds love like that again. But the chance that he does? Well… It isn’t zero.

The murdering really took me by surprise