Reading

Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin is a brutal and powerful book. I felt as if it was providing a deep look into past prejudices and how they destroyed their targets: namely, gay men. Published in 1956, it must have been a shock to readers — or perhaps the readers of that time held such negative views of gay men that they were insensitive to the impact of the self-hatred experienced by the narrator. Baldwin is brilliant in describing his character’s clear consciousness of how his peers must have detested him. I wonder if some readers were indifferent to the way the character bows to society’s cruel judgement of him, a judgement that he internalized. I chose this book because I wanted to read about Paris in the 1950s, and of course there is plenty of Paris atmosphere in the book, but it’s the ugly atmosphere of low-life bars and poverty.

In a 1956 review in the New York Times, I found little sympathy for the suffering of the narrator: “Much of the novel is laid in scenes of squalor, with a background of characters as grotesque and repulsive as any that can be found in Proust's ‘Cities of the Plain.’ But even as one is dismayed by Mr. Baldwin's materials, one rejoices in the skill with which he renders them.” (Granville Hicks, “Tormented Triangle,” NYT October 14, 1956)

The Dream is one of the twenty novels in Zola’s series titled Les Rougon-Macquart, published between 1871 and 1893. Each volume in the series highlights a character or a family that typify some aspect of French society in the second half of the 19th century in France. I’m enjoying The Dream, which is about the life of a young girl — an adopted orphan — in a town around 2 hours outside Paris: that is, two hours by the transportation that was available in the 19th century. The plot is slightly exaggerated with the angelic nature of the girl and her extreme religiosity, despite Zola’s famous antipathy to religion. She has a dream to marry a wealthy prince, and the book follows this as if it’s a fairy tale, not a story about an orphan taken in by a middle class couple. It’s lyrical (as the reviews all note) but I also feel a sense of irony in the much-too-happy plot.

I’ve only read a few of the novels in this amazing and fascinating series (maybe I’ve read six of them), and my ambition is to read more, as well as to read some of Zola’s other novels. I think I like his brutal realism better than this maybe fake idyl.