Overall Rating: 8.5/10
This book is quite short at only 159 pages long but I felt the progression of the story is well-paced and manages to capture in-depth character interactions and create very human characters who didn’t feel like caricatures of stereotypes. The story is a bittersweet one, actually, it’s less sweet and more bitter in hindsight.
The story is told from the perspective of David, an American man, traveling in Southern France. He then meets an American woman, Hella, during his travels and they quickly get engaged. Hella, clearly unsure of her engagement and wanting a few more weeks of freedom, extended her travel to Spain, leaving David to travel to Paris. There he ends up meeting Giovanni, a young and dangerously attractive bartender. Over the course of winter then spring, the two of them fall in love. Hella returns to Paris once she feels ready to settle down with David. Confronted with two very different paths, David opts for the safer one, or rather, the straighter one. Giovanni is (rightfully) devastated and upset by David suddenly leaving him. Their affair comes to a messy and abrupt end. Giovanni spirals internally. He goes to Guillaume, the man who ‘took him in’ and gave him a job as the bartender (then fired him), to get his job back. But Giovanni’s pent up sorrow and anger at David, the world, and himself is released on Guillaume, who taunts him one too many times and comes on too him too strongly (for the umpteenth time). Giovanni murders Guillaume in a fit of uncontrollable rage. Over the course of a week, Giovanni is arrested. David, travelling around France in a desperate attempt to avoid confronting Giovanni and all the harrowing emotions that would dredge up, is utterly devastated by the news of Giovanni’s arrest and consequential death sentence. As the days lead up to the trial, David’s ‘love’ for Hella fades into irritation and nothingness. Clearly, he regrets ever leaving Giovanni, though this is never stated as it is told in first person and he is a very unreliable narrator. David never sees him again and Hella leaves him once finding out about his sexuality. Giovanni is guillotined. David is now alone in a foreign country, friendless and loverless.
David is an infuriating character. At the very heart of it, he is just a man bound by social expectations and an unrelenting sense of fear. Throughout the book, we see his juxtaposing emotions for Giovanni. His hatred and love often vividly and strongly contrastingly expressed in the same sentence, demonstrating his volatile inner turmoil. Giovanni is much simpler in his love for David. David and Hella both see each other as a safety net, a way to settle down and follow norms perpetuated by American culture. The omnipresence of the so called ‘American Dream’ is palpable. A white picket fence, a well-rounded All-American family, a husband “watching my woman putting my children to bed”. Ultimately, it is heartbreaking to see David’s mistreatment of Giovanni through the projection of his insecurities, self-hatred, and not-so-internalized internalized homophobia. He can’t make his mind up. Even when he chooses Hella, he is plagued with doubt, but vehemently refuses to look back after making his decision, both literally and metaphorically.
