Eric Maas’s Reviews > Giovanni's Room > Status Update

1.03 First night with Giovanni, at a different bar where Mme Clothilde hosts the darker side of Gay Paris. After which Giovanni invites David to his room. Then back to the lonely night in the south of France, where the caretaker comes to check out, with the old and solid advice of marrying a nice girl and saying a prayer now and then…

…oddly enough, he blushed, which made him, in the light of the pale, just rising sun, resemble a freshly fallen angel .

’…like putting an electric plug in a dead socket. Touch but no contact. All touch, but no contact and no light.’
I asked him: ‘Why?
‘That you must ask yourself,’ he told me, ‘and perhaps one day this morning will not be ashes in your mouth.’

1.02 Meeting Giovanni.

The flaming princess zombie instantly caused a flashback to the boat scene of Von Aschenbach’s arrival at the Lido in Der Tod in Venedig. This time he comes as a very direct messenger of catastrophe…

Everyone, after all, goes the same dark road —and the road has a truck of being most dark, most treacherous, when it seems most bright — and it’s true that nobody stays in the garden of Eden.

1.01 - Origins. David watching himself in the night that is about to end badly for Giovanni, of whom we know nothing yet. Memories of meeting Hella (gone), Joey (betrayed, deserted), father. With some very lucid thoughts, proving that he has come a long way from self-deception and possibly even self-loathing…

AndI began to cry. And if speaking had been agony, this was worse and yet I could not stop.
And my father’s face changed. It became terribly old and at the same time absolutely, terribly young. I remember being absolutely astonished, at the still, cold center of the storm which was occurring in me, to realize that my father had been suffering, was suffering still.

Fathers ought to avoid utter nakedness before their sons. I did not want to know — not, anyway, from his mouth — that his flesh was as unregenerate as my own . (p. 15)