There will be a girl sitting opposite me who will wonder why I have not been flirting with her, who will be set on edge by the presence of the recruits. Two or three of them will end up before our compartment door, shouting at each other in their heavy, ribald voices, smoking their dreadful army cigarettes. At each stop, recruits in their baggy brown uniforms and colored hats will open the compartment door to ask Complet? We will all nod Yes, like conspirators, smiling faintly at each other as they continue through the train. People will be roaming the corridors outside, looking out of windows, looking in at us. Someone will offer to share a sandwich with me, someone will offer me a sip of wine, someone will ask me for a match. We will ride through the same changing countryside northward, leaving behind the olive trees and the sea and all of the glory of the stormy southern sky, into the mist and rain of Paris. The train will be the same, the people, struggling for comfort and, even, dignity on the straight-backed, wooden, third-class seats will be the same, and I will be the same.

I may be drunk by morning but that will not do any good.

My ancestors conquered a continent, pushing across death-laden plains, until they came to an ocean which faced away from Europe into a darker past. My face is like a face you have seen many times. My reflection is tall, perhaps rather like an arrow, my blond hair gleams. I watch my reflection in the darkening gleam of the window pane. I have a drink in my hand, there is a bottle at my elbow. I STAND AT THE window of this great house in the south of France as night falls, the night which is leading me to the most terrible morning of my life. But Hella’s return to Paris brings the affair to a crisis, one that rapidly spirals into tragedy.ĭavid struggles for self-knowledge during one long, dark night–“the night which is leading me to the most terrible morning of my life.” With a sharp, probing imagination, James Baldwin’s now-classic narrative delves into the mystery of loving and creates a deeply moving story of death and passion that reveals the unspoken complexities of the human heart. Soon the two are spending the night in Giovanni’s curtainless room, which he keeps dark to protect their privacy. While she is away on a trip, David meets a bartender named Giovanni to whom he is drawn in spite of himself. In the 1950s Paris of American expatriates, liaisons, and violence, a young man finds himself caught between desire and conventional morality.ĭavid is a young American expatriate who has just proposed marriage to his girlfriend, Hella. From one of the most brilliant and provocative literary figures of the past century comes a groundbreaking novel set among the bohemian bars and nightclubs of 1950s Paris, about love and the fear of love–“a book that belongs in the top rank of fiction” ( The Atlantic).

Giovanni's room buy