Giovanni's Room

I think this book is by far one of the best ones I have read since...perhaps ever. I may have been as excited about another book, say, Doris Lessing's Marriage of Zones Three, Four and Five or Neil Gaiman's Fragile Things, but I haven't had the same experience that I've had with Giovanni's Room. Not only was the prose sharp and quick and observant, but it was also invasive.
Invasive.
Yeah, invasive. It got under my skin, and at some points that felt really nice, but there were certainly times when I had to put it down and walk as far away as I could. I am nothing like that character, and yet I still identified with him. During the second part, the sickness spread to my mind. I found myself reading eagerly, or perhaps hesitantly waiting to see just how hard things are going to fall, and at the same time thinking about things totally outside this book, questioning my life in the same way, at the same time. That means my brain was processing two different scenarios parallel to one another. It was a bewildering experience.
Perhaps it also helped that for no particular reason whatsoever, I happened to have skimmed my Strunk & White's Elements of Style: illustrated this morning and had a sense of E.B.White's fanaticism for unwasted words. I remember thinking that it's a lot easier to not waste words when you are free to write as much or as little as you want, but college students don't have that leisure. Baldwin adheres to this rule, intentionally or not, and does so brilliantly.