The narrator David is labelled as a representative of his culture introduced throughout as “monsieur l’americain”, his father tells him he is “as American as pork and beans” and he himself knows he shares a “common quality” with all the other Americans in France. There may not be – as Knopf complained – any black characters, but this enabled Baldwin to say even more about white American culture. If Americans can mature on the level of racism, then they have to mature on the level of sexuality.”Īnd he has plenty to say about race. But how America dealt with racism was connected to how it dealt with sexuality, in Baldwin’s mind: “The sexual question and the racial question have always been entwined, you know. In the eyes of Knopf, his previous book, Go Tell It on the Mountain had focused on “the negro problem” his new novel about white homosexuals, therefore, would ruin his reputation. You don’t need to know much about Baldwin to see how this book wasn’t a great departure. Giovanni’s Room documents the experience of people who have faced prejudice, lived with the shame of being cast out of society, and whose very nature has put them in danger. While posterity has shown just how wrong they were to try to restrict Baldwin’s vision, they were also mistaken – for Baldwin was, in fact, writing about the same things. Examining the mystery of love and passion in an intensely imagined narrative, Baldwin creates a moving and complex story of death and desire that is revelatory in its insight.When Knopf rejected Giovanni’s Room in 1956, the publisher told James Baldwin it was because he wasn’t “writing about the same things and in the same manner as you were before”. After meeting and proposing to a young woman, he falls into a lengthy affair with an Italian bartender and is confounded and tortured by his sexual identity as he oscillates between the two. In a 1950s Paris swarming with expatriates and characterized by dangerous liaisons and hidden violence, an American finds himself unable to repress his impulses, despite his determination to live the conventional life he envisions for himself. Baldwin’s haunting and controversial second novel is his most sustained treatment of sexuality, and a classic of gay literature.

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