I have not read a tragedy with such perfect form since Shakespeare. The sense of doom is conveyed perfectly in both structure and description. At first, I tried to write a criticism about some of the misogyny in the work, but Baldwin made sure it had a point in the end. This is only my second Baldwin, but it won't be my last and it is, by far, my favorite.

The foreword of this version includes a note about failed screenplays and I am shocked it has not been put to film yet. I hope one day one of those screenplays works out so this story gets before more audiences.

Since finishing this book, I’ve read some reviews and critiques online and I have to agree with what I’ve seen. 

This book is beautifully written. Baldwin’s prose elicited so many emotions from me. I feel like everyone can relate to having a toxic relationship and being codependent with a partner- those are difficult feelings to reflect on. David is a complex character and everyone around him is calling him out for being an unkind, cold person. I felt like I knew David and could relate to his confusion about himself and constant anxiety about who he is as a person. 

Though this was obviously an influential and important novel for queer literature, it was problematic which made it hard to read in 2025. The transphobia, internalized homophobia, misogyny/sexism were very apparent. Was this a reflection of the times or the author’s personal feelings? I’m not sure but either way, it really affected my enjoyment of this story. 

DISCLAIMER: while i have spoiler tagged some things, the entirety of my review could probably be seen as spoiler-y. probably skip this one if you haven’t read giovanni’s room and want to avoid spoiler-y discussion of it.

i had been looking forward to reading this book for a very long time, and it in no way disappointed. i read it in one day, but in slight fits and starts, mostly to write down passages that were particularly moving to me (i collected 35), or just to take a breath and compose myself. i found myself, towards the end, pausing simply to cry for a moment. there is an obvious, tangible sense of tragedy and doom in this novel. you know how it will end but you don’t look away. you know how it will end but you find yourself wishing for some miracle, that things will resolve themselves.

there is an incredible enormity to this novel. how could baldwin possibly have poured all of it into a mere 159 pages? there are no punches pulled. every sentence is precise. baldwin had a near-complete mastery of the english language. every word, you sense, is specially chosen for maximum meaning and effect. this is not a light book by any means. it is incredibly lonely, even though the narrator, david, spends almost all of his time talking to someone. he is lonely internally, shackled to himself and his idea of masculinity, manhood, and sexuality. he is so afraid to love, to be open, to be truthful, that he closes himself off, and

is left with nothing.

here, i am struggling to put my thoughts into words. whatever i say could not possibly do justice to the sheer beauty and excellence of this novel. i can scarcely even begin to imagine how to talk about it without feeling like i’m sullying it somehow, with my floundering, inept attempt at a review. sure, i may be pedastalling this book a bit, but to me, it is genuinely worthy of it. i can barely think for want of vomiting, my feelings so heavy and all-encompassing. while reading, i broke to have dinner at some point, and briefly deferred coming back to this book because i knew i had to come back into the mindset i had earlier cultivated. that is, incredibly melancholy and reflective. i love difficult and challenging and upsetting works precisely because they have such an effect on you as a reader. i love feeling emotionally drained by something. it’s proof that something has touched me, of art. surely there is little higher praise to any artist than to know that they have moved their audience emotionally.

anyway, enough of me… but one last thing: reading this felt like being ripped open and laid bare. it was exposing. you are placed so firmly in the narrator’s mind that his shame becomes your shame. you spend the entire time knowing that he is sabotaging himself at every juncture because of his inability to accept himself as he is. with giovanni, he wants to have his cake (happiness) and eat it too (living the life expected of him). the novel is full of contradictions, of duplicity, of mirrors, of having two feet in different worlds.

of course, the main preoccupation of this novel is sexuality and internalised homophobia and of social isolation/alienation. there is also the construction of shame and identity. david - the narrator, who is almost never referred to by name, as if even this is a stripping of his identity, or an enforcement of his insularity - has a fierce desire to be the all-american man’s man, like his father, or at least his understanding of his father. he knows that he is not, because he sees what he regards as rottenness in him - an attraction to men, which is a threat to his manhood. he does not necessarily attempt to disavow himself of his homosexuality (and here, the specifics of his sexuality can be debated, but i interpreted him as a gay man, and that is how i will refer to him), but neither can he bring himself to look it in the eye. he knows who he is, what he wants, he just does not allow himself to even entertain the idea of it becoming reality. but he is weak, and fallible, and human, just like the rest of us, and he falls in love with giovanni anyway. it is incredible to see such self-denial on the page as in this book. david has caged himself in so thoroughly that though he can see the sky through the bars, he makes no move to leave. he has a complete inability to live fully and freely. he is isolated in his head - from who he is and who he wants to be. he is isolated from the people around him - he is constantly looking for reds (co-conspirators and disapprovers alike) under the bed because he is unable to face himself. he is isolated from his environment - he is an american in paris, unmoored and adrift, with no feeling of home or belonging anywhere. giovanni’s room thus truly becomes the core of the book - here is a space in which david is safe. it is small and dirty and shabby and isolated, but it houses his love. david attempts to run from the world, to bury himself in giovanni’s room and exist somewhere apart from everywhere else. giovanni seeks shelter here as well, with david, and they live, briefly, in their bubble. giovanni wants to make it work forever, but david can never commit himself to authenticity. giovanni’s room is a sanctuary, it is where david is invited to be his true self, but this is something he cannot access due to years of self-deception and manipulation.

how difficult it is to be human. we could say so many things to david - do this, do that, throw caution to the wind, stay with giovanni, but david is written to be human. he is complex, incredibly so, and sympathetically unsympathetic. baldwin’s greatest message, and warning, to the reader is that fear dams love. things - feelings, ideas - curdle within us when we let them fester. if you are afraid to love you cannot be open. and why is that the way we are? why is happiness so difficult to achieve? what makes us happy? we look at david and we say you are a black hole! you are so starved of love you have none to offer anyone else! though of course, we know this is untrue. david has love, but his ability to externalise it has been so twisted by what we call ‘toxic masculinity’, and his notion that he is beholden to what society wants from him. he wants to settle down with hella and have children because that is what is expected of him.

he does not want this at all.

another thing: the horror of closetedness. david experiences everything through this lens. he believes in the myths of life. he is terrified of being found out, and canvasses others so that he may either present himself ‘appropriately’ or he can judge them for being just like him. every character in the novel is a mirror of some aspect of him. giovanni, for example, opens something up for david. he challenges him, by showing him what opening himself up to love and embracing his authentic self can look like. giovanni is the prospect of david’s happiness, personified. in a similar vein, hella does not truly exist for much of the novel.

until she arrives back in paris, she mostly only exists as the paragon of heterosexual respectability. it doesn’t really matter who she is, because she is a contrasting barometer. then, suddenly, she is real, and david realises he cannot live in two worlds, and he needs to pick one. suddenly, hella has personality, and immediacy.

jacques is, like he says to david at the beginning, what david could turn into, should he continue to deny himself.

he is, of course, most probably right. there is very little hope that david can return to ‘normalcy’ after the events of the book. he is doomed to the sad life he sneered at; to be trapped in the hell of his own making.

david is a projection to please others. he regards everyone with suspicion, and if not suspicion, the assumption that they can see right through him. it is not that he necessarily feels fraudulent - rather, he fears that there is some pink, gooey centre of him that betrays him to passersby, one that he cannot see but is immediately obvious to others. he fears that this is a betrayal of his manhood, and without his manhood, he is nothing, because that is what he has dedicated himself to. he wants to explore aspects of himself, but without repercussion. he does not succeed in escaping repercussion, and it is difficult to ascertain just how much he has changed and grown over the course of the book, apart from perhaps putting a name to some things;

he eventually admits to loving giovanni, and to having fabricated a relationship with hella to fulfil his fantasies of ‘normalcy’. but, his behaviour itself barely changes.

something i found very interesting to track throughout the book was instances in which david acted childishly. he has a childish attitude to his own attraction to men, and seems to be subconsciously recreating his boyhood relationship with joey, with giovanni. just an interesting thread, one which speaks to a larger conversation on how our childhoods shape us into adulthood, and how david never grows past his adolescent sexuality, where he felt his first shame. i think shame is the feeling that stains us the most. it does not come off easily in the wash, and it often takes a lifetime to overcome our shames. it is so depressing to see it reflected back at us in the form of david. his shame has engulfed him.

i think i have said what i wanted to say, but there is no dearth of things to say about this book. it is so enormous to me that i think i will continue to unpick it for a long time to come. it has such incredibly beautiful, expertly-crafted prose, with such a depth and (ironically) honesty to it. i would say i wish i had read it sooner, but i think where i am in life right now is the perfect time to have read it. i hope this book touches all who read it like it touched me.

Not a happy story. Lots of internalized homophobia as well as slur.  Please know that the french words refering to gay men here are also slurs do not use it. 


There is talk about mysogyny, gender identity questionning. The book is also critical of death penalty. 

For the first maybe third of this book I didn’t think it was for me, but by the end I was invested and really touched. I’m also really surprised at the openness about homosexuality both in the plot and the book itself given when it was written; it was eye-opening about the culture of the time but also surprisingly relatable 80 years later. The book struck me as really honest and insightful for that reason, and I feel I learned a lot - in various ways - reading this perspective.

Baldwin does a fantastic job exploring emotional themes through the internal experience of the narrator, moments of reflection, and through is interactions of relationships, showing a lot in small moments without over-explaining. Despite being a woman in 2025 l, I felt a lot of depth and relatability in various ways with the themes of identity the narrator explores, through the experience of all of the characters and their relationships. (I am queer, and living abroad, but it takes a lot for me to feel this deeply for a male- focused l experience and I believe it will work for others who share less demographic similarities with the subjects.) Themes like living away from home and internationally and the concept of home; bisexuality and identity and belonging and self-hatred - functioning in a society that wants you to choose; the pull between loving and despising someone, and between love and sexuality; existing as an outsider; desire and jealousy and power and social dynamics within a social group, especially a marginalized one; — in general, and I say this seriously and without a trace of irony or exaggeration, about human nature.
I was especially impressed with the depth with which the book explores love and sexuality, while including basically no sexual content. I have nothing against it , and I think it would have been just as good with more, but I think it’s a testament to the author that he accomplished what he did in this way.
Also, I cried quite a bit towards the end, for the character and the story and also for how I found myself and my loved ones and my experience of life in it.

Only not 5 stars because the beginning didn’t draw me in as much as I would have liked. I’m so glad I kept at it.

This is a book for if you don't mind "bury your gays" and also "torture them a little bit first"