Giovanni’s Room – James Baldwin

„It became, in a way, every room I had ever been in and every room I find myself hereafter will remind me of Giovanni’s room.” (Quotation page 76)  

Content

David’s mother dies when he is only five years old and he grows up with his father and his aunt Ellen, the unmarried sister of his father. As soon as possible, he leaves and lives on his own. When he feels weary of every part of his life in New York, he moves to Paris, where he meets Hella. When he asks her to marry him, she leaves him, travels to Spain to think about her future. David stays in Paris. One evening he meets the bartender Giovanni, and from the first moment, there is a deep attraction between them. Giovanni lives in a small one-room-apartment and David moves in the same evening. When Hella comes back, David leaves Giovanni on that same day, pretending that this love affair never has happened.

Theme and Genre

This novel, written 1956, is about living between truth and lies, bisexuality, love, lost innocence, shame and guilt. An important topic for Baldwin’s persons is their search for their sexual identity and the related insecurity.

Characters

David, the young American, hides his feelings for men and feels sure about Hella, wants to marry, settle down and have children. His life is a perfect vision, created for the others, but a vision, he desperately tries to believe to be true. He knows that Hella will probably come back.

Giovanni is Italian, emotional and lives his feelings. That David, whom he trusts and loves, just leaves without a word destroys him.

Plot and Writing

David, the first person narrator tells the story during one night, and thinking about the next day, just in the present time. The first pages contain the whole story, revealing the major points, themes and conflict. Doing so, the author is free of any timeline and suspense level. The story moves between memories and significant events in David’s childhood, teenage years, and his years in Paris, and the hours of the present night and morning. A central point of the story is Guilleaume’s bar, a place for bohemians living their sexual diversity. Baldwin uses the scenes to describe a different live, working or without work at daytime, but waiting for the evenings and living during the night. He shows a very special picture of early Parisian mornings and the locations still open or just opening, for example the famous Les Halles.

Conclusion

Not always highly acclaimed by literary critics, this novel for a long time now is a timeless classic. Written with empathy and sensivity, in a poetic narrative language, the story gives many questions to reflect on them, about human life, decisions, possible guilt and fate.