Giovanni's Room

James Baldwin

From Shelf: Books that will have you staring into space for half an hour after finishing

David has just proposed marriage to his American girlfriend, but while she is away on a trip he becomes involved in a doomed affair with a bartender named Giovanni. This title is set in the Paris of the 1950s, where a young American expatriate finds himself caught between his repressed desires and conventional morality.

'Until I die there will be those moments, moments seeming to rise up out of the ground like Macbeth's witches, when his face will come before me, that face in all its changes, when the exact timbre of his voice and tricks of his speech will nearly burst my ears, when his smell will overpower my nostrils...'Giovanni's Room is set in the Paris of the 1950s, where a young American expatriate finds himself caught between his repressed desires and conventional morality. David has just proposed marriage to his American girlfriend, but while she is away on a trip he becomes involved in a doomed affair with a bartender named Giovanni. With sharp, probing insight, James Baldwin's classic narrative delves into the mystery of love and tells an impassioned, deeply moving story that reveals the unspoken complexities of the human heart.