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

…I take the blue envelope which Jacques has sent me and treat it slowly into many pieces, watching them dance in the wind, watching the wind carry them away. Yet as I turn and begin walking toward the waiting people, the wind blows some of them back on me.

I feel for Hella, brave Hella, but I relate to David, who fails to find any answers. To her, or to himself…

All the words I wanted to say closed my throat, like weeds, and stopped my mouth. (p. 144)

Much has been written about love turning to hatred, of the heart growing cold with the death of love. It is a remarkable process. It is far more terrible than anything I have ever read about it, more terrible than anything I will ever be able to say. (p. 139)

2.04 - The break-up after Hella’s return. Giovanni dramatic but believable and sincere in a terrible rant. Very personal and incomparably unique, yet so very much like going through my own break-ups, being the hurt Giovanni and the betraying David, both heart-broken, but the latter drawing the shortest straw, for the guilt of deliberate insincerity, to lie to both may be worse than the raw grief of the other…

…something opened in my brain, a secret, noiseless door swung open, frightening me: it had not occurred to me until that instant that, in fleeing from his body, I confirmed and perpetuated his body’s power over me. (p. 128)

2.03. Giovanni out of a job. David confused and severely mixed up, not ever able to let go of his escape scheme back to the acceptable life, but at the same time unable to cut off Giovanni. Such a convincing ambiguity, present on every page…

And then something shakes me, I feel shaken hard and dry, like some dead thing in the desert, and I know that I am hoping that Giovanni is being sheltered in someone’s arms tonight (p. 101)

I smiled and I really felt at that moment that Judas and the Saviour had met in me.

To lie in all sincerity, surprising yourself while acting so, to get through the awkwardness of the moment seems to me more human and more true than all the plans and resolutions we read about in books and movies and the stories we tell each other…

2.02 - Betrayal. Of Giovanni, of Sue, of his self…

She wrote the strangest smile I had ever seen. It was pained and vindictive and humiliated but she inexpertly smeared across this grimace a bright, girlish gaiety — as rigid as the skeleton beneath her flabby body. I’d fate ever allowed Sue to reach me, she would kill me with just that smile.