Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin - First British edition

FIRST BRITISH EDITION

London: Michael Joseph, 1957.

Baldwin's second novel is about a young American in Paris attempting to come to terms with his sexuality.

In The New Yorker, Colm Tóibín noted that Baldwin may have been the greatest American prose stylist of his generation.

"Until I die there will be those moments, moments seeming to rise up out of the ground like Macbeth’s witches, when his face will come before me, that face in all its changes, when the exact timbre of his voice and tricks of his speech will nearly burst my ears, when his smell will overpower my nostrils. Sometimes, in the days which are coming—God grant me the grace to live them—in the glare of the grey morning, sour-mouthed, eyelids raw and red, hair tangled and damp from my stormy sleep, facing, over coffee and cigarette smoke, last night’s impenetrable, meaningless boy who will shortly rise and vanish like the smoke, I will see Giovanni again, as he was that night, so vivid, so winning, all of the light of that gloomy tunnel trapped around his head."

-James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room