Giovanni's Room Review

I am bookending this year with another James Baldwin novel. January ‘21 had me wrapping up Another Country, a subsequent study on troubled young people struggling with sexual identity. However, in Giovanni’s Room, published in 1956, I found a far more censored approach to addressing gay relationships. Albeit equally affecting and thoughtful. 

David is an American in Paris hinging on an engagement with a young woman who for the majority of this book is vacationing in Spain. While his lover is away, the narrator happens upon Giovanni, a handsome bartender whose room becomes the backdrop for their love affair. The Parisian hierarchy of older men, whose socioeconomic upper hands manipulate and prey upon the well-beings of the two main characters, is a centralized thread of tension that prevails at the expense of Giovanni.  The effect is bleak, but with Baldwin’s phrasing and scene framing it is difficult not to want to eat this short book like a tasty lunch. 

Baldwin’s second novel challenges conventions of love and safety with a modern style of prose that has me wondering how people read this comfortably in the fifties. Giovanni’s Room has not only aged gracefully, it remains a profound meditation on the tragic downside of love and what it can do to human beings.