James Baldwin: Giovanni's Room (1956, Dial Press, N.Y.)
Published Nov. 5, 1956 by Dial Press, N.Y..
Considered an 'audacious' second novel, GIOVANNI'S ROOM is set in the 1950s Paris of American expatriates, liaisons, and violence. This now-classic story of a fated love triangle explores, with uncompromising clarity, the conflicts between desire, conventional morality and sexual identity.
Beautiful music telling us terrible things, to paraphrase Tom Waits. Heartbreaking and lovely. (And if, like me, you get stopped short by the guillotine being used in the 1950s — the last execution by guillotine in France was in 1977.)
A portrait of 1950s Paris, American culture and the margins of bourgeois society, of internalised homophobia and gay desire, of power and cruelty. And the psychogram of a privileged, pathologically passive and deeply disagreeable man, including two grotesquely dehumanising transphobic passages. All rendered in dense, vivid language and impeccable structure and style.
I cannot believe I haven't read anything by Baldwin until now. This was stunning. Difficult to read at times, but really truly spectacular.
