Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin

 

You can come to a new book in so many ways – a review, a recommendation from a friend, desperation at the airport or station where you will sometimes buy just about anything so you have something to while away a few hours when you can’t go anywhere. I’ve bought books on the basis of all three of these and I think most people would agree that the first two methods are usually, but not always the most reliable because it’s really embarrassing when a friend loves something you really hate!

I came to Giovanni’s Room after reading an interesting interview with Sharmaine Lovegrove who has worked as a bookseller for over twenty years, but couldn’t get a job in publishing. She argues that there is a real disconnect between the publishing industry and readers. The interview is worth reading in its own right, but it also lead me to another article written two years earlier in which she takes about the lack of diversity in UK publishing, her own history as a book seller including opening a bookshop in Berlin and finally heading up Dialogue Books, a small publishing imprint dedicated to publishing books aimed at the LGBTQI+, disabled, BAME and working-class communities. In reading these two articles I came to realise Lovegrove is a serious booklover with some excellent points to make about publishing. So when one of the articles ended with a list of some of the books that had been a major influence on her, I took notice. One of them was Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin.

Giovanni’s Room was first published in 1956 and is narrated by David, a young American who flees the expectations of his father and aunt to live what he thinks will be a more liberated life in Europe. The story is told in flashback – at the start David is holed up in Italy on his own and preparing to journey back to Paris where the Giovanni of the title is due to be executed for murder. By degrees, the story reveals David’s relationship with Giovanni, a beautiful Italian boy working for cash and tips as a barman in a Parisian bar frequented by drag queens, rent boys and middle-aged Parisian roués.

To say that David is confused by his sexuality is putting it mildly. He has a one-night stand with a male friend as a teenager and is immediately ashamed of himself. He turns his back on his friend and spends the next few years distancing himself from unwelcome emotions. He has a fiancé exploring Italy while he stays in Paris with Giovanni which causes tension as Giovanni asks what will happen when she returns. And as his relationship with Giovanni ignites and begins its slow burn, it veers from fascination to passion to hate and self-hate as it progresses.

Although the main thrust of the story is the relationship between David and Giovanni, other characters are vividly drawn including Guillaume, the owner of the bar where Giovanni works and Jacques, an aging Belgian-born American with deep pockets and an eye for a pretty boy. Both characters circle the lovers' unfolding relationship like sharks.

Giovanni’s Room really worked as a title because for me it almost becomes a character in its own right. It’s a love nest and a sanctuary for Giovanni’s and David’s relationship and later becomes almost a prison both to David as he struggles to decide what he wants and to Giovanni who is stuck in his small room with nowhere to go when the rest of his world turns against him.

Although the book was first published in the mid '50s, it doesn’t feel dated. Of course there are references that denote the period it is set in, but if anything the book’s exploration of sexual, moral and emotional dilemmas feels extremely modern and while the train wreck of David and Giovanni’s relationship felt inevitable, there was a part of me that wanted it to work – for David to make a decision and for Giovanni to find a place and a person to call home. But life in novels is almost never like that, so I bow to the author and the story he wanted to tell, which is an extremely compelling and accomplished one, albeit one laced with tragedy.

It feels fitting that I came to Giovanni’s Room by way of Sharmaine Lovegrove and the article about the lack of diversity in publishing because I wonder how much James Baldwin had to fight to get Giovanni’s Room published back in 1956. I suspect the publishing imprint she runs now would fall over itself to publish this book and they’d be right to do so because it’s an excellent read and one I was really happy to discover.

Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin was first published in 1956 and my copy was published by Vintage.