![]() And Giovanni would not be about to perish, sometime between this night and this morning, on the guillotine. If this were not so I would not be alone in this house tonight. People are too various to be treated so lightly. ![]() David reflects on the fateful events that led him there, alone in this house, full of regrets and self-loathing. We understand that he’ll be leaving soon, that his former girlfriend is already on her way back to America and that Giovanni will be executed the next morning. (Like Saint-Paul-de-Vence, where Baldwin used to live). When the book opens, David, a twenty-eight, tall and blond American is in alone in a house in a village in the South of France. Life in that room seemed to be occurring underwater, as I say, and it is certain that I underwent a sea-change there. ![]() ![]() I did not really stay there very long-we met before the spring began and I left there during the summer-but it still seems to me that I spent a lifetime there. It became, in a way, every room I had ever been in and every room I find myself in hereafter will remind me of Giovanni’s room. I scarcely know how to describe that room. Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin (1956) French title: La chambre de Giovanni. ![]()
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