“Giovanni’s Room” by James Baldwin

One of my favorite paths into death literacy is to look for the themes of death and grief in fiction. Unless you’re reading How To manuals, every book you’re already spending time with is likely a way to contemplate death and grief, by simply paying attention to the language around it and how that resonates within you, the reader. “Giovanni’s Room” is a classic masterpiece of love, but real love, the kind that wrenches your heart and leaves spittle on your face when your lover is declaring in earnest. Set in 1950’s Paris, Baldwin creates the main character, Paul, as an American expat torn between two loves and the identity each signifies to the world: the conventional morality with practical Hella and the hypnotic desire he shares with impoverished Giovanni.

Grief is weaved through this tale from its very first pages to the heart-wrenching final ones. Though this is ultimately a love story, in true Baldwin fashion, it is also a story laced with death and violence. But the heart of this story is love in the way that Baldwin mastered: love standing on its own in completeness - not a neatly tied coming-out tale of homosexuality or a saccharine romance blessing the lovers. Instead “Giovanni’s Room” is a book of love that grips you in its passion, exhausts your emotions and consumes your attention. When you finally finish the book, you feel as you do at the end of a love affair, startled and bewildered by the sheer power and magnitude of the love that just swept you away.