Giovanni's Room
James Baldwin · 1956
Baldwin's 1956 Parisian novel: a white American man falls in love with an Italian bartender while engaged to a woman. The prose is like ice, clear and cold and cutting. It opened a space for literature that simply did not exist before. The most elegantly written American novel about sexuality and shame.
The case against
Baldwin tells you in the opening pages that Giovanni will die by the guillotine, then marches David through a hundred and fifty pages of self-loathing toward it. Hella exists to be wronged; David's contempt for women, and for himself, makes him punishing company. The prose is exact; the doom is airless.
Literary Fiction · the Pro canon
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
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