2025/152: Giovanni's Room — James Baldwin

2025/152: Giovanni's Room — James Baldwin

As for the boys at the bar, they were each invisibly preening, having already calculated how much money he and his copain would need for the next few days, having already appraised Guillaume to within a decimal of that figure, and having already estimated how long Guillaume, as a fountainhead, would last, and also how long they would be able to endure him. The only question left was whether they would be vache with him, or chic, but they knew that they would probably be vache. [p. 53]

I read about James Baldwin's life and work in Nothing Ever Just Disappears, and it sparked the urge to read one of his novels: Giovanni's Room is perhaps the best-known: a short novel about an American, David, who goes to Europe to 'find himself', takes up with Giovanni but fears and rejects his own sexuality, and ends up with emptiness. David's first-person narrative begins, he tells us, on 'the night which is leading me to the most terrible morning of my life': the morning on which Giovanni will be executed. 

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