Review of Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin

*Giovanni’s Room* by James Baldwin (1957). Published by Laurel.

There have been two writers I’ve been constantly listening and reading to in the past few months: Zora Neale Hurston and James Baldwin.

Hurston is simply because of the my graduate program and we were reading Tell My Horse, which kickstarted a broader obsession for me on what it means to be a Black woman looking to the past in her era (something she was cancelled for by her male Black contemporaries, as they wanted to look towards the future).

Anyways, having worked at the Smithsonian for a remote internship in the past six months, I’ve been spending quite a bit of time listening to audiobooks while I work.

I found Giovanni’s Room as one of the available books to check out immediately and decided to go for it.

There are so many things I could’ve listened to that I’ve been on hold waiting for in a decent while, but Baldwin is one of my favorite writers—he had to jump the line here of priorities. It took me about a week and a half to finish this book, but man was it gorgeous.

Let’s get into the review!

An American man in Paris grapples with his sexuality, especially when it comes to a man named Giovanni.

The main character in this novel is David, whose girlfriend has gone to Spain while he’s in Paris. He’s begun seeing a man named Giovanni, who’s Italian, but, at the beginning of the novel, we learn that Giovanni is about to be guillotined for a crime he committed.

The girlfriend is returning to the United States after all of these events, and we’re about to full the full extent of what’s happened to everyone involved here.

David has a recollection about his first time with a boy back in Brooklyn, and how he denied his own sexuality and bullied the same boy, despite having sex with him, in order to feel more masculine.

Living with his father and aunt, he starts drinking, and he convinces his father after an accident to let him go to Paris instead of going to college. A year passes in Paris and David is struggling financially, and he summons Jacques, an older gay man, to beg for money. They meet at a gay bar run by Guillaume, where Giovanni is bartending.

This is the first meeting between David and Giovanni, and they become friends. Eventually, Giovanni and David begin living together after he moves into Giovanni’s room, but as we see in the novel later on, he describes it as dirty and a place he needed to escape from (there’s definitely some mental caging going on here when it comes to this, as the room feels like a place he’s mentally trapped inside of). His father sends a letter asking him to come back to America, but David refuses.

He then gets a letter for him fiancée, Hella, who tells him she will be returning soon. David prepares to leave behind the room, and then goes off to find a woman to convince him he’s not actually gay.

He has sex with an acquaintance, but when he returns back to the room, a distraught Giovanni reveals he has been fired from his job. Hella returns and David leaves, sending a letter to his father asking for money, as Hella and he are going to get married.

When together, they run into Giovanni and Jacques at a bookstore. David takes Hella back to her hotel, and David goes back to Giovanni’s room to tell him that their odds are impossible.

After the fact, he continues to run into Giovanni and becomes upset at how feminine or “fairy” his mannerisms are, as well as the fact that he’s now dating Jacques. As you can tell, David has a lot of masculinity issues going on here. Jacques and Giovanni do break up though, and Giovanni gets his job at the bar back.

But then a twist happens: Guillaume has been murdered. Giovanni is the prime suspect, and and David comes up with some scenarios in his own head of what could’ve happened, some of which include Giovanni sleeping with Guillaume to get his job back.

It is heavily implied that Giovanni is too messy and his public life is on full display, which is why Guillaume really didn’t want to keep him around. Giovanni, after hiding out from the cops, is arrested for murder.

Hella and David move to the countryside, and a conversation reveals Hella wold like to be a traditional wife and live under a man. But David can’t get over Giovanni and his looming death, so he leaves her behind to go to Nice and hangs out with a sailor.

Hella tracks him down and discovers that he’s bisexual, reveals that she thought this all along, and then leaves him. The novel ends with David imagining Giovanni’s execution and how he feels so guilty about it.

Overall Thoughts

This is such a gorgeous novel when it comes to the quality of the prose; Baldwin is best known for his nonfiction work, but I think his fictional novels are truly works of art as well.

This is a book that you really need to experience beyond a blog post like this, and I think I will be picking up a copy for my personal collection in the near future, as I want to dissect the book and what went into the more complex parts of it.

A lot comes up to the surface within David’s narration, but there are some subtle moments that I want to return to throughout the rereading process. I’ll be thinking about this one for a while, though.

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