Dubai Bibliophiles: Giovanni’s Room

His publishers rejected Giovanni’s Room as a failure, telling James Baldwin the novel would damage his reputation. Knopf claimed the judgement was nothing to do with the book’s content, but Baldwin was convinced that the publisher didn’t want “a story of homosexual love between a white American expat living in Paris and an Italian bartender being told by a Black man from Harlem”. In the event it’s reception was distinctly mixed; but nearly 70 years after its publication, Giovanni’s Room is considered one of the great novels of the 20th century – and writing about it in The New Yorker, Colm Tóibín described Baldwin as “the greatest American prose stylist of his generation”, which seems fair enough. James Baldwin’s groundbreaking novel of male desire should make for an excellent (if potentially risky) subject for the book club.