William2's Reviews > Giovanni's Room

I like this more than the three stars would indicate. The melodrama was a problem for me. The plot is simple and brilliantly done. David the American doesn’t want to admit he has homosexual impulses. His fiancée, Hella, doesn’t know he’s gay because David doesn’t know it. David is confused, as his friend Jacques at one point remarks. He’s experiencing major cognitive dissonance, simultaneously knowing something and acting as if it weren’t so. For he has met the beautiful, the irresistible Giovanni. Giovanni and David do it in the former’s squalid room, which David sees as a metaphor for punishment and grief, for poverty. There’s no goddamned way he’ll end up stuck in that rat hole. During their renovations, they remove bags of bricks from the room and scatter these in the neighborhood. (?)

Now Hella is returning from Spain where she has gone briefly to think about whether she wants to marry David. David is set to dump Giovanni because he doesn’t want to be a faggot. No way, he wants to be a real American man, with the little woman putting the kids to bed at night while he’s in the study drinking himself to death and dreaming of cock. Soon his fiancée will learn the truth. Giovanni, driven mad by lost love, will be guillotined for a grisly crime. Yes, we’re in Paris. The writing style is assured, even mellifluous, if at times highly melodramatic in the manner of some—my least favorite—of Emile Zola’s novels of social realism. The prose wavers between a kind of operatic hysteria and passages that are sonorous if not haunting. The merde’s about to hit the fan. Clear the room everyone. This would make a lovely opera. Is there a Rossini among us? Here’s your libretto.