Will I love Giovanni's Room?

It was my introduction to heralded American author James Baldwin. As an English major and author, I really should have read him years ago! The book’s premise alone is impressive: A white bisexual man in 1950s Paris struggles with his sexuality, in a story written by a Black American. Baldwin being Baldwin, I continued to be impressed as I read, by his beautifully rendered portrayal of love, lust, friendship, identity and guilt (plus murder!) in the seedy bars and dreary streets of Paris.

As a writer, each time I read anything by James Baldwin, it´s like I´m getting a master class in how to capture a feeling and translate that into an articulate thought. When a friend told me to read this book over 30 years ago, shortly after I came out, they said this was “the best, and perhaps the most tragic novel about bisexuality ever written.”

Years later, it still kicks me in the gut each time I read it. Baldwin´s detailed examination of David´s desire for Giovanni while simultaneously being engaged to his fiancé, Hella, remains achingly beautiful.

I was overwhelmed by how James Baldwin portrayed his characters with such feeling, beauty and compassion. This is a deeply human story that is relatable, troubling, yet edifying. You can feel both the pain and the joy in the reflective manner in which David, the narrator, shares the story. It made me feel as if I was sitting in the back of a restaurant in Paris in the 1950s and taking in all who walked through the door. Although David struggles with his love of another man, societal pressures turn him inside out. It may have been controversial at the… show more.

James Baldwin's debut novel, Go Tell it on the Mountain, is a remarkable accomplishment, so I was surprised to find his second novel even more formally polished and emotionally sophisticated.

Giovanni's Room is one of the major works of twentieth-century American literature, capturing the ineffability and intense contradictions of romantic love.

The book's psychological portraits are astonishingly rich, especially given its modest length. Like many novels by Henry James, it envisions Europe as a space of radical possibility, ludic rule-breaking, and danger.

This was an instant all-time favorite.

James Baldwin is one of my favorite authors, and this book is a short, masterful look at the mechanisms behind queer shame. Two lovers, David and Giovanni, hide in a darkened room in self-imposed exile in Paris until the narrator’s sense of shame breaks their love trance.

David, an American who is engaged to a woman, cannot bear to continue his gay affair and so leaves Giovanni, prompting a confrontation with a changed reality and a tragic reckoning with the guillotine. 

I love this book because line after line and paragraph after paragraph floor me.

"People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception. Their deci­sions are not really decisions at all—a real decision makes one humble, one knows that it is at the mercy of more things than can be named—but elaborate systems of evasion, of illusion, designed to make themselves and the world appear to be what they and the world are not."

It lifts you with perfect prose and then hammers you with… show more.

This classic piece of literature, written by James Baldwin in 1964, twists the handle to the closed door of homosexuality in an attempt to bring life to the love story of two youthful men struggling with their true identity in the streets of Paris.

David and Giovanni discover each other in the dim bars of the nightlight surrounding the sector of the deprived. Baldwin’s words testify to the anguish of those denying their true selves, pushing them into lives of lies and secrecy.

In a heartfelt novel, Baldwin succeeds in showing the reader the hardships of homosexuality when the subject… show more.

Set in Paris, with David the sexually conflicted central character who has an affair with the doomed Giovanni.

This book – written in 1956 – is an incredibly brave exploration by Baldwin into Gay/Bi sexuality – breaking new ground in LGBTQ+ representation whilst at the same time creating an atmosphere of almost stereotypically gay angst – perhaps even initiating some of the cliches around gay life that were to become mainstream – and used by heterosexual society against us.

That doesn’t stop it being a novella of great significance and febrile passion – like a passionate quickie up against the… show more.

James Baldwin’s classic story of erotic doom and betrayal came to me far too late; it’s the sort of book you wish you’d read sooner and then plan to read again.

The novel articulates the real pain of unrequited erotic love—doomed erotic love—narrated by a person accused of not loving enough.

At the opening, we learn that Giovanni is to be executed, and the story unravels the desperate entanglement of two men in Paris in mid-century.

The love in this novel, while passionate, is never far from its opening sense of doom; love is mixed with hate and terror: “this… show more.

“I am the man, I suffered, I was there.” These lines from Walt Whitman announce that Baldwin’s eloquently written novel is probably the first by an already famous author announcing that he was gay, or at least bisexual. The only explicit sex in the novel is heterosexual. Including only straight sex in the story of an American expatriate in Paris and the waiter Giovanni reflects what could be published by a major publisher. It echoes one of the book’s main themes: denying your true feelings is a kind of living death, destructive of others as well as of yourself.