This book was unbearable. Love danced like motes in a sunbeam, beautiful and fleeting, broken apart by sudden cataclysms of disgust, driven by shame. over and over, love becomes impossible, sullied, like Giovanni's room, by damp black claustrophobic death, the encroaching clutter of trash and poverty, that crushes once vibrant lusts. The twin haunts of marginalisation and self-alienation. A fatalism eats away at every moment of possibility, until joy becomes synonymous with despair. Hope only prolongs the inevitable, yet resignation is an inverted mirror, an unlife you live apart from yourself and those you love, returned to Giovanni's room, but alone, empty, and full of regret.

One of the most lyrical and awful book I've read. You don't have to be in the closet to understand its power. Anyone who's been shamed for what they love will understand Giovanni's Room. The incessant tug of possibilities, retracted by one's terror of the societal consequences. The subsequent disgust that shields one from reaching out, from affirming the forbidden and the necessary. And the awful deadening of one's body as one sinks into the oblivion of normality.