Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin

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).

One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years

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.

Why I Picked It Up

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James Baldwin is a gap in my reading repertoire, undoubtedly. Every quote by him I see is gorgeous and striking, but I've only seen them piecemeal, posted by Nitch or The Paris Review or on Substack, probably layered and layered and layered.

An author peer of mine—I.V. Marie, author of the highly successful Immortal Consequences duology—also cited Giovanni's Room as a favorite at one point, which made me bump it up my list. I wanted to read a Baldwin book before the end of the year, and my library hold came in over the weekend. (I'd also just been in a small book hangover over Lance Richardson's True Nature: A Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen, and this read was a good segue out of that.)

About the Book

The book begins with our narrator in a dark hotel room alone, drinking and reflecting on a formative relationship. Now, that's not my favorite way to start a book and most workshops would tell you that's overdone by now. Baldwin, of course, was grandfathered into that being considered great. (I feel the same way about Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov intro and any novel that broadly begins with "let me introduce you to some characters.)

He reflects back on being in his late 20s in Paris, and the book starts with the memory of him repressing his attraction to men—mainly, a night of passion with a childhood friend, Joey, before he fled elsewhere. He mentions the wall up between him and his father, having realized that he needs to protect aspects of his inner life (in this case, especially formed around his sexuality.)

In Paris, David is out with another queer friend, Jacques, who also walks this strange affection/resentment line. They're close because of familiarity, but there's tension there. They don't like each other. Maybe they know too much.

That's the first introduction to one of the themes I took away from Giovanni's Room, primarily: intimacy as a power struggle, and how easily the balance can tip. Someone who knows you or sees you has power over you, and that can make you hate both them and yourself.

If that's how closeness occurs for you, then true connection feels like a trap—which is a sentiment that veers almost into Norwegian Wood territory, although Murakami's version is oblivious to the narrator's self-absorption whereas Giovanni's Room addresses the methodology of compartmentalization and interior walls outright. The symbolism of being trapped in a spatial sense, and even the suffocation of a passionate partnership, however lovely, is obvious.

On a personal level, I resonated a lot with these questions of relationships. I'm very purely straight so don't mean to imply I can relate to the layers of representation within this, but one of my complications romantically has always been a terror around sense of dilution. The problem with building an identity around hyperindependence and self-sufficiency is that any change in that status then can make you feel like something is being taken. I've worked through plenty of this, and it's just a personality trait, albeit one that has always made dating tricky for reasons I hadn't always been aware of. I can relate both to David's self-protective instincts and walls up, but also to Giovanni's sense of betrayal that David is able to treat their relationship interchangeably.

In the sociocultural context, we understand why David is so locked down: because it's an LGBTQ+ story, and men loving men is stigmatized so heavily. It's not a significant leap to see the development of shame turn into the negotiations and tensions baked into this exchange of power, although it does add in some fascinating, worthwhile questions about defining masculinity 1) in contrast to other masculinity, or 2) in contrast to femininity, which is the function Hella, David's fiancé, serves within the plot.

Highlights + Lines I Loved

“Nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.”

“People are too various to be treated so lightly. I am too various to be trusted. If this were not so I would not be alone in this house tonight.”

“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.”

“The world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget.”

“When you have waited—has time made you sure?”

“Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can afford and you are not that young anymore.”

“But you can make your time together anything but dirty, you can give each other something which will make both of you better—forever—if you will not be ashamed, if you will only not play it safe.”

“And I resented this: resented being called an American (and resented resenting it) because it seemed to make me nothing more than that, whatever that was; and I resented being called not an American because it seemed to make me nothing.”

“Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.”

“'Maybe everything bad that happens to you makes you weaker,' said Giovanni, as though he had not heard me, 'and so you can stand less and less.'”

“I remember thinking that, in effect, he had never left prison, prison was all that was real to him, he could speak of nothing else.”

“Why, you will go home and then you will find that home is not home anymore. Then you will really be in trouble. As long as you stay here, you can always think: One day I will go home.”

“I had hoped that when I saw her something instantaneous, definitive, would have happened in me, something to make me know where I should be and where I was. But nothing happened...I loved her as much as ever and I still did not know how much that was.”

Overall Thoughts

Tonally, the book actually reminds me of one of my favorite books: Revolution by Jennifer Donnelly. There's a dash of Norwegian Wood and Flowers for Algernon in there. By now, there's a vein of books about suicidality in Paris to choose from, as well as tormented relationships.

Overall, it's stirring and powerful and heavy in moments. You feel the claustrophobia of their circumstances, Giovanni's passion, and the darkness of those Parisian nights—so David isn't inherently in the wrong for finding it to be too "too much" or unrealistic, and Giovanni isn't in the wrong for finding his abruptness to be monstrous. The relational aspects of the book are, again, complex but elegantly rendered.

My personal favorite aspects of the book come as no surprise if you know my taste: these clear, piercing lines of introspection, whether through existential dialogue exchanges or moments of profound self-awareness by the narrator. He's not being stubbornly self-delusional, but he still runs up against these moments in which his actions sabotage himself. It's not so easy to disentangle, from another relationship or from the contradictions within his own self; he writes a lot about the dissolution of labels of individuality and how that process is generally complicated.

Needless to say, I see why James Baldwin is so celebrated. I enjoyed the book, and would have loved to read it in an English class.

For fans of

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera; The Plague by Albert Camus; Revolution by Jennifer Donnelly; Romancing the Dark in the City of Light by Ann Jacobus; Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami; Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes; "Tonight I Can Write" by Pablo Neruda.