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Book Reviewed by:From one of the most brilliant and provocative literary figures of the past century comes a groundbreaking novel set among the bohemian bars and nightclubs of 1950s Paris, about love and the fear of love—"a book that belongs in the top rank of fiction" (The Atlantic).
In the 1950s Paris of American expatriates, liaisons, and violence, a young man finds himself caught between desire and conventional morality.
David is a young American expatriate who has just proposed marriage to his girlfriend, Hella. While she is away on a trip, David meets a bartender named Giovanni to whom he is drawn in spite of himself. Soon the two are spending the night in Giovanni's curtainless room, which he keeps dark to protect their privacy. But Hella's return to Paris brings the affair to a crisis, one that rapidly spirals into tragedy.
David struggles for self-knowledge during one long, dark night—"the night which is leading me to the most terrible morning of my life." With a sharp, probing imagination, James Baldwin's now-classic narrative delves into the mystery of loving and creates a deeply moving story of death and passion that reveals the unspoken complexities of the human heart.
Excerpt
Giovanni's Room
I stand at the window of this great house in the south of France as night falls, the night which is leading me to the most terrible morning of my life. I have a drink in my hand, there is a bottle at my elbow. I watch my reflection in the darkening gleam of the window pane. My reflection is tall, perhaps rather like an arrow, my blond hair gleams. My face is like a face you have seen many times. My ancestors conquered a continent, pushing across death-laden plains, until they came to an ocean which faced away from Europe into a darker past.
I may be drunk by morning but that will not do any good. I shall take the train to Paris anyway. The train will be the same, the people, struggling for comfort and, even, dignity on the straight-backed, wooden, third-class seats will be the same, and I will be the same. We will ride through the same changing countryside northward, leaving behind the olive trees and the sea and all of the glory of the stormy southern sky, into ...
Giovanni's Room is the only book Baldwin ever wrote featuring all white characters, and he did so for a reason — not feeling he could address issues relating to Blackness and queerness in the same book (though he did this later). But this work as much as the rest of his work affords importance to the body and to communal existence. Sexuality, social identity, and physical intimacy are treated as crucial parts of the human condition, not just vital to parsing societal values and signifiers but to a serious philosophical understanding of life. In Giovanni's Room, Baldwin shows how David's sense of his masculinity and whiteness affects how he receives his queerness, how he treats it as shameful, even in private, how he wields power over others to stave off a growing sense of helplessness. He views women — like his fiancée Hella, with whom he believes, for a time, he can have a future — as adornments to keep others from seeing him in his nakedness and nothingness. Against Giovanni — who is emotional, vulnerable, and seems to feel, if not exactly racialized, made "ethnic" in the eyes of a well-off white American — David distinguishes himself as (supposedly) calm, cool, and rational to the point of coldness and cruelty...continued
Full Review
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(Reviewed by Elisabeth Cook).
While rereading and reviewing Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin, a book that has stayed with me for many years, I wanted to see what others have taken away from the novel, an early work of queer literature and a mid-century story of an American confronting his Americanness overseas. It was interesting to see recurrent themes and references in what writers today have to say about Baldwin's novel, and to find similarities in observation and experience between my own perspective and theirs. Essays by Colm Tóibín and Garth Greenwell below each use Henry James' The Ambassadors, another story of American life abroad, as a point of comparison. Both Greenwell and Gabrielle Bellot contrast their powerful feelings upon first reading Giovanni...
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