David is an American in Paris in the 1950s, just mooching around doing not very much, and with no apparent need to earn a living thanks to occasional handouts from his father. His girlfriend Hella, a feisty modern liberated type of girl, has headed off to Spain on her own to do some exploring and plans to return to Paris in a few weeks, whereupon she and David have some vague plans culminating in probably returning to the USA, getting married, squeezing out a few babies, the usual stuff.
Having borrowed some money from his friend Jacques (who is older, clearly gay, and clearly has some designs on David which David is dimly aware of and not above exploiting) David agrees to accompany him to a bar run by Jacques' friend Guillaume. Here David meets handsome Italian barman Giovanni and experiences some troubling turmoil, you know, down there.
But actually we already know some of this, and also that something catastrophic has occurred since which has resulted in Giovanni being under sentence of death by guillotine. We know this because of the framing device, written from David's perspective some time later as he stays in a hotel somewhere outside Paris; this framing device also makes reference to some formative homosexual experiences in David's teenage years where some harmless boyish rough-and-tumble and play-fighting high-jinks and a brisk shower and rub-down afterwards led inexorably to some furious cock-gobbling, all subsequently shrugged off and forgotten about.
So there is a general sense that David's sexuality might be a bit fluid and ill-defined, even (perhaps especially) to himself. It's not surprising, therefore, when after a night at the bar, some more drinking elsewhere and a group excursion to Les Halles (this is back when it was still a market) for a breakfast of white wine and oysters, David and Giovanni end the night by heading off to Giovanni's place for a portion of Italian salami.
And so a relationship is established, mainly conducted in various bars (including Guillaume's) and in Giovanni's room in a house near Place de la Nation. Giovanni's initial twinkly Italian charm has morphed into some slightly needy clinginess, and David is trying to maintain some arm's-length detachment in the knowledge that Hella will return at some indeterminate date in the nearish future, at which point the merde will presumably hit the ventilateur. But, armed with some newly-acquired self-knowledge, are David's previous plans with Hella for a future life together what he really wants any more anyway?
Hella eventually returns, David heads down to the railway station to meet her (without telling Giovanni where he's going, of course), and they resume their previous life of swanning round Paris together and having nice God-fearing vanilla heterosexual sex. Eventually the inevitable happens and they run into Jacques and Giovanni in a bookshop. Rather surprisingly, given Giovanni's theatrical relief at David's reappearance and dismay at his having abandoned him and not told him where he was going, and Jacques' furious eyebrow-raising and Kenneth Williams noises, Hella shrugs the whole thing off as a disagreement between friends and Giovanni being stereotypically Italian and demonstrative, rather than as evidence of something rum going on.
David subsequently returns to Giovanni's room to see him and explain to him that they can't have a future together; even in relatively bohemian 1950s Paris any official public acknowledgement of a gay relationship would be impossible. Later, while David is back with Hella, news comes through that Guillaume has been murdered and that Giovanni is the prime suspect. After a brief period on the run Giovanni is captured and sentenced to death. Hella is sympathetic to David's dismay at this, believing that the two were nothing more than close friends, but eventually David decides he can't live a lie any more and must embrace his true identity, which he does by going to nearby Nice and hooking up with a whole battalion of sailors; while winding down with a refreshing drink after a gruelling session of being recreationally spit-roasted by the entire crew of the French Ark Royal (L'Arche Royale, if you must), who should walk into the bar but Hella, and the jig is up. She has always known, it seems, on some level at least.
And so the collapse of David's life is complete: Hella returns to America, and sentence of death is carried out on Giovanni.
This was James Baldwin's second novel, published in 1956, and differs from his first, Go Tell It On The Mountain, in that all the major characters are white. Baldwin's stated reason for doing this was that he specifically wanted to write a novel about sexuality and didn't want another axis of oppression and struggle getting in the way. Obviously there's no reason why you have to centre black characters if you, the author, are black (as Baldwin was), any more than you can only write about gay characters if you are yourself gay (as Baldwin was). Equally there's no reason why a straight person (me, for instance) of whatever skin colour living in the early 21st century can't enjoy a book about gay life in 1950s Paris - which, as it happens, I did. Some of this stuff is universal even if some of it is also quite specific, and it is in any case possible to imagine yourself living a different life to the one you actually have; that, arguably, is the whole point of fiction.
Anyway, Giovanni's Room is widely acknowledged as a classic of gay literature and I wouldn't disagree with that assessment; other books on this list to have featured gay relationships as a central plot point include A Stone Boat, A Fairly Honourable Defeat, Days Without End and not many others that I can see on a quick scan through the archives.
One thought you might have on reading the bits in the framing sections about Giovanni's impending execution is: wait a minute, surely they weren't still guillotining people in the 1950s? It turns out they very much still were: the last person to be executed by guillotine in France (or anywhere else for that matter, if we're talking about state-sanctioned judicial killings) was Hamida Djandoubi as recently as September 1977, and the last person to be executed publicly in this way was Eugen Weidmann in June 1939, recently enough for the event to be filmed and, needless to say, available on YouTube (that video isn't particularly graphic, but does feature someone's head being cut off, so caution is advised). Execution by the literal detaching of someone's head from their body does seem more visceral and startling than, say, shooting someone, but is almost certainly quicker and more painless (albeit a bit more messy) than some of the methods still used today, mainly in the USA, like electrocution, gassing and lethal injection.
Here's a crackpot theory for you, and, as all the best theories do, it has to do with Robert Redford, who died last week at the age of 89, and shoes.
Anyway, the central point made in a number of the obituaries was that it was easily to be distracted from his acting ability by how absurdly handsome he was, something easy even for a tediously vanilla heterosexual bloke such as myself to appreciate. That is something that Redford himself complained about (but not too much; I mean, come on) in the context of it limiting his range of roles. The quote that was circulating on the internet after his death was this one from director Mike Nichols in relation to Redford being considered for the role that eventually went to Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate:
“I interviewed hundreds, maybe thousands, of men,” Nichols explained. “I said, ‘You can’t play it. You can never play a loser.’ And Redford said, ‘What do you mean? Of course I can play a loser.’ And I said, ‘O.K., have you ever struck out with a girl?’ and he said, ‘What do you mean?’ And he wasn’t joking.”
So, getting to the point, my thesis is this: there are two sorts of people in the world, with two fundamentally different sorts of outlook on it, and life. The first sort either apply absolutely no thought whatsoever to what might happen beyond two minutes from now, or have a sort of blithe assurance that all will be well, nothing can or will go wrong, and they won't ever get into a position where they get stranded (e.g. if the car breaks down) on the way home from the swimming run and have to hike across a field in the dark in sliders, flip-flops, whatever. The other group of people assume that these things may well happen and that some more robust ready-for-anything footwear may be required. I myself for instance do own a pair of flip-flops, but they are strictly for home or holiday use and never worn in any situation where I might be required to do anything involving walking any significant distance or driving a car. I might wear my Converses or Vans if I'm in a cazh mood and the weather is warm and dry, with the caveat that I probably wouldn't wear the Converses for the swimming run as the thin canvas material and those two little instep holes mean they suck up water pretty effectively.
Looking at it another way I think this probably also divides down the nerd/jock boundary, where the nerd contingent might be slightly more inclined to get into the habit of wearing shoes that facilitate a quick getaway in the event of trouble. To put it another way, people who might feel a need to escape from other people (anyone who was ever bullied at school, for instance) might be more inclined to wear escape-facilitating footwear than those who might more generally expect other people to run away from them.
The pursuer/pursuee (yeah, I know, not really a word) model works for linking this back to Robert Redford as well - imagine (if you can) being someone who looked like him. I don't want to use the phrase "beating them off with a shitty stick" but it seems pretty appropriate here; it's hard to imagine him ever having to expend very much effort to be in the company of someone who wanted to get into his pants. The only advantage for the rest of us who might have to work slightly harder is that (this is what I choose to believe, anyway) since we had to work a bit harder at attracting a partner in the first place, and additionally might have more of an incentive to keep them around, we might be more inclined to generosity and attention to detail in the bedroom department, if you know what I mean, ladies.
Just catching up with a couple of authorial deaths that I'd missed during the second quarter of 2025. You can't afford to take your eye off the ball here; a moment's inattention and Electric Halibut will have dispatched another novelist with ruthless efficiency. This time both of the victims were named in my informal Dead Pool of a few months back and both were in the second half of their 80s: Frederick Forsyth was 86 and Mario Vargas Llosa 89. I'd read Aunt Julia And The Scriptwriter as long ago as 2007, so he effortlessly grabs the curse length award from David Lodge. That was only the fourteenth book featured here so candidates for a longer curse length in the near-ish future would have to come from its predecessors on the list, of whose authors Alison Lurie, Michael Dibdin, Lawrence Durrell, Iain Banks and Anita Shreve are already dead. Most likely candidates are probably Alan Garner (90), Michael Ondaatje (81) and Margaret Drabble (86).
I expect you've made some New Year's resolutions for 2025, and I imagine mine are in no way out of the ordinary: match or exceed the paltry running schedule I managed in 2024, try to take it a bit easy on the old sauce, at least before breakfast anyway, finally perfect that perpetual motion machine, world peace, etc. etc. This blog, on the other hand, has stormed out of the traps in 2025 in pursuit of one thing and one thing only: DEATH. And you would have to say it's made a pretty strong start with the demise at the age of 89 on New Year's Day of David Lodge, author of Thinks... which appeared here in March 2008, and also a dozen or so other novels of which I have read a handful including the three (Changing Places, Small World, Nice Work) which are now grouped together rather grandly as The Campus Trilogy.
Those are probably the three novels you want; if you must have only one I'd say the first, Changing Places, is probably the best. Much is made of Lodge never winning the Booker Prize and he features highly (alongside Beryl Bainbridge and a few others) on lists of best authors never to have won it. As I said elsewhere it's probably the case that his books were a bit cosy and middle-class to win, though as befits a literature professor he did discreetly sneak in a bit of experimentalness in places.
At a couple of months short of 17 years Lodge also wrests the title of longest-surviving cursee from the barely-cool dead hands of Kinky Friedman.
