Key’s Reviews > Giovanni’s Room > Status Update

“The morning weighs on my shoulders with the dreadful weight of hope”. Why is hope dreadful? I agree…

“The journey to the grave is already begun, the journey to corruption is, always, already, half over. Yet, the key to salvation, which cannot save my body, is hidden in my flesh.”

“When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. I long to make this project come true.
I long to crack that mirror and be free. I look at my seed, my troubling seed, and wonder how it can be redeemed, how I can save it from the knife.” (Cont’d)

“The body in the mirror forces me to turn and face it. And I look at my body, which is under sentence of death. It is lean, hard, and cold, the incarnation of a mystery. And I do not know what moves in this body, what this body is searching. It is trapped in my mirror as it is trapped in time and it hurries toward revelation.” (Cont’d)

“ ‘Don’t you see how unjust it was to wait for me to find out? To put all the burden on me? I had the right to expect to hear from you—women are always waiting for the man to speak. Or haven’t you heard?…I’d be home by now, dancing with some man who wanted to make me. And I’d let him make me, why not?’
‘Perhaps..I only knew I had to get out of Giovanni’s room.’ “

Does lying to yourself (David lying to himself) absolve his lying to Hella? The way he treated her?

“ ‘If I stay here much longer,…I’ll forget what it’s like to be a woman…there are women who have forgotten that to be a woman doesn’t simply mean humiliation, doesn’t simply mean bitterness. I haven’t forgotten it yet,…in spite of you. I’m not going to forget it.’ “ UGH

“ ‘David, please let me be a woman. I don’t care what you do to me. I don’t care what it costs. I’ll wear my hair long, I’ll give up cigarettes, I’ll throw away the books.’ … ‘Don’t throw me back into the sea, David…’ THIS may be what infuriated me about this book. This woman relying on this dishonest man to make her a caricature, pleasing with him as he has already given up his charade

“ ‘How do you know I’m what you see?’ …
’Because…I love you.’ …
‘Ah! I loved Giovanni—‘
‘Not as I love you’ “

How have David’s fears changed since the beginning of the novel? It’s gone from shame to a fear of love.
What kind of choices do the characters believe they have? To live within or outside of the confines of man versus women versus other.