Books like Giovanni's Room
Most readers finish Giovanni's Room in a day or two and want another book that works the same way. The eight below each share one thing with it: the city, the subject, the voice, or the length. Filter by what you want more of.
What readers usually love about Giovanni's Room
- A novel short enough to read in a sitting
- Paris in rented rooms and late bars rather than on postcards
- Desire written plainly, at a time when almost nobody did
- A narrator who is honest about everyone except himself
No. 1
Another Country
Baldwin's longest novel, published six years later. It takes what Giovanni's Room holds inside one room and opens it across New York and Paris, with every combination of race and desire he could get on the page. The natural next book if you wanted more of the subject and more of the world around it.
His first novel: one day in a Harlem storefront church, and the family histories underneath it. This is where the voice comes from. The pulpit rhythm that the narrator of Giovanni's Room speaks in was learned here, from a boy who preached at fourteen.
His first essay collection, and the shortest route into Baldwin's non-fiction. It contains "Equal in Paris," his account of the eight days he spent in a French jail in 1949 over a stolen hotel sheet — the same city as the novel, in his own voice instead of a narrator's.
No. 4
Just Above My Head
His last novel, narrated by the brother of a gospel singer. It follows love between men across a whole life rather than one season, and it is the fullest thing he wrote about faith. Long, and the right choice if Giovanni's Room left you wanting the rest of a life rather than the end of an affair.
His only book of short stories, and the home of "Sonny's Blues" — a schoolteacher, his younger brother the jazz pianist, and about forty pages. It is the most anthologised thing he wrote, and for once the reputation is deserved.
Colette published this in 1932, twenty-four years before Giovanni's Room, and it is the closest thing on these shelves to the same subject. Not a novel: a sequence of portraits and remembered conversations about desire in its varieties, including the women who loved women, written with a directness almost nobody else managed at the time. Colette thought it might be her best book.
No. 7
The Sun Also Rises
Ernest Hemingway's Paris novel, thirty years earlier and the same expatriate city — cafés, cheap rooms, and a crowd that talks around the thing that matters. Its narrator also cannot have the person he wants, for an entirely different reason, and also declines to say so straight out.
No. 8
Tropic of Cancer
Henry Miller's Paris: the same streets and the same class of rented room, told by someone who found the whole predicament funny. The opposite temperament to Baldwin's, which is exactly why it is worth reading beside him.
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