I think this is a great novel, but its flaw is its age. Also, what's hilarious is the camp wasn't camp at the time Giovanni's Room was written, that's what was expected, and indeed the characters themselves reflect those older, brutally hetero-normative attitudes in their interactions (or lack of them.) The real drawback is that the story itself proceeds from an older, outmoded, outdated concept of human sexuality and many of the moral attitudes prevailing when it was written are VERY apparent in the way the novel skips over the juicy bits, while continually pointing to them and apparently lingering over things that don't seem to have relevance to the story, but considering the amount of repression in American society at the time this was written, it would probably help to look for various clues about the story in the stuff that doesn't seem related.
The point of Baldwin's writing wasn't to "get to the end of the story" but to enjoy the ride through it, and to learn something along the way.
Baldwin is a master of the mood and if you approach his prose the way you'd approach music or a poem then that might help, the relationships between words in the novel are as important as the story that the novel is telling. Chip Howell The poetic language of the book is what kept me reading, that and this particular novel's similarities to the work of Franz Kafka (in totally unexpect …more The poetic language of the book is what kept me reading, that and this particular novel's similarities to the work of Franz Kafka (in totally unexpected ways, but I'd spoil the plot if I said how: nobody turns into cockroaches or anything, but there is a certain attitude that is very "Kafkaesque" and it makes you wanna strangle the protagonist,or at least slap him every three pages) I think that the hardest thing to actually deal with in terms of this book is the fact that it's old fashoned in so many ways: that's not a bad thing: but for readers more accustomed to the brevity common in more contemporary writing, the slower pacing is a HUGE turnoff and it seems to linger over things that don't seem that important or that big a deal, but given the time in which this novel was written, the very idea of a men being affectionate towards one another was unheard of and couldn't actually be written about without heavy, heavy censorship.Īs for what kept me reading was the fact that I loved the language of the book more than I loved the story itself.
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