Giovanni's Room
Baldwin pairs a charged love story with sharp, searching attention to fear, morality, and self-knowledge.
- Themes
- Love and fear of love, Desire and conventional morality, Self-knowledge and tragedy
- Pacing
- Mixed
Desire and Dread
Come here for
- A layered literary exploration of desire and conventional morality
- The intimate, uneasy pull of a story about love and fear
Expect
- Serious psychological tension and a deeply introspective voice
- A tragic emotional arc, not an easy escape
Where it sits
How strongly BookFrontier reads the book as belonging to each subject.
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For younger readers: The Great Disillusionment of Nick and Jay, His Own Where, A Scatter of Light
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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.
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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.
Publisher details
Publisher categories
- Gay Fiction
- Literary Fiction
- Black Fiction
- Authors
- James Baldwin
- Publisher
- Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
- Published
- September 12, 2013
- Format
- Print & ebook
- Reading lane
- Gay Fiction