Mono No Aware, or the Transcience of Giovanni

Baldwin presents the reader with a very interesting conundrum in Giovanni's Room. The novel jumps forward and backward in time, and we are told early in the novel that the title character dies. As a result of this, Giovanni becomes a kind of ephemeral, tragic figure. This reminds me of the Japanese concept of Mono No Aware, or a sympathy for transient things, a value of the beauty of the fleeting. In a lot of ways, Giovanni is othered from the other queer characters. His history in Italy is exotic and tragic. Even without the foretold execution, he almost seems doomed. David and Giovanni's time together is presented as beautiful partly because it has an end. Eventually David has to address the Hella problem. Eventually Giovanni has to die. The sense of doom is overt, unlike in The Price of Salt where Highsmith plays with your instincts. "This has to go wrong somewhere," you think. I can't help but compare Giovanni's Room to E.M. Forster's Maurice, another frank depiction of male homosexuality. Maurice ends happily, despite all odds, and wasn't published in Forster's lifetime (possibly for that reason.) I'm not even close to the model yet, but I hope that Giovanni becomes a little bit less poeticized.