Giovanni’s Room Paperback – January 1, 2013 by James Baldwin

Description

Author: James Baldwin

Brand: Vintage

Color: Black

Edition: 1

Features:

• Vintage Books

Package Dimensions: 16x201x181

Number Of Pages: 176

Release Date: 12-09-2013

Details: Product Description
Set among the bohemian bars and nightclubs of 1950s Paris, this groundbreaking novel about love and the fear of love is “a book that belongs in the top rank of fiction” (The Atlantic).

In the 1950s Paris of American expatriates, liaisons, and violence, a young man finds himself caught between desire and conventional morality.

David is a young American expatriate who has just proposed marriage to his girlfriend, Hella. While she is away on a trip, David meets a bartender named Giovanni to whom he is drawn in spite of himself. Soon the two are spending the night in Giovanni’s curtainless room, which he keeps dark to protect their privacy. But Hella’s return to Paris brings the affair to a crisis, one that rapidly spirals into tragedy.

David struggles for self-knowledge during one long, dark night—“the night which is leading me to the most terrible morning of my life.”  With a sharp, probing imagination, James Baldwin’s now-classic narrative delves into the mystery of loving and creates a deeply moving story of death and passion that reveals the unspoken complexities of the human heart.
Review
“If Van Gogh was our 19th-century artist-saint, James Baldwin is our 20th-century one.”  —Michael Ondaatje
“A young American involved with both a woman and a man. . . . Baldwin writes of these matters with unusual candor and yet with such dignity and intensity.”  —The New York Times“Absorbing . . . [with] immediate emotional impact.”   —The Washington Post“Mr. Baldwin has taken a very special theme and treated it with great artistry and restraint.”  —Saturday Review“Exciting  . . . a book that belongs in the top rank of fiction.”  —The Atlantic“Violent, excruciating beauty.”  —San Francisco Chronicle“To be James Baldwin is to touch on so many hidden places in Europe, America, the Negro, the white man —to be forced to understand so much.”   —Alfred Kazin“This author retains a place in an extremely select group; that composed of the few genuinely indispensable American writers.”  —Saturday Review“He has not himself lost access to the sources of his being —which is what makes him read and awaited by perhaps a wider range of people than any other major American writer.”  —The Nation“He is thought-provoking, tantalizing, irritating, abusing and amusing.  And he uses words as the sea uses waves, to flow and beat, advance and retreat, rise and take a bow in disappearing . . . the thought becomes poetry and the poetry illuminates thought.”   —Langston Hughes“He has become one of the few writers of our time.”   —Norman Mailer
About the Author
James Baldwin (1924–1987) was a novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and social critic. His first novel,
Go Tell It on the Mountain, appeared in 1953 to excellent reviews, and his essay collections
Notes of a Native Son and
The Fire Next Time were bestsellers that made him an influential figure in the growing civil rights movement. Baldwin spent much of his life in France, where he moved to escape the racism and homophobia of the United States. He died in France in 1987, a year after being made a Commander of the French Legion of Honor.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
I stand at the window of this great house in the south of France as night falls, the night which is leading me to the most terrible morning of my life. I have a drink in my hand, there is a bottle at my elbow. I watch my reflection in the darkening gleam of the window pane. My reflection is tall, perhaps rather like an arrow, my blond hair gleams. My face is like a face you have seen many times. My ancestors conquered a continent, pushing across death-laden plains, until they came to an ocean which faced away from Europe into a darker past.

I may be drunk by morning but that will not do any good. I shall take the train to Paris anyway. The train will be the same, the people, struggling for comfort and, even, dignity on the straight-backed, wooden, third