Giovanni's Room

Giovanni's Room is a novel by the American writer James Baldwin, published in 1956. It is set in the Paris of American expatriates in the 1950s.

David is the young American at the centre of it. His girlfriend Hella has gone to Spain to consider whether she wants to marry him, and while he is on his own in Paris he meets Giovanni, an Italian bartender, at a bar. The bar is one of the places where the expatriate life of that decade is lived.

The novel follows the affair between the two men and the difficulty David has in admitting to himself what it means, and it asks what happens when desire runs against the morality a person has been raised with. It is as much about what he will not admit to himself as it is about the affair itself.

It was a controversial book when it appeared, and it has since become one of the novels through which questions of homosexuality, bisexuality and internalised shame are most often discussed.