After three months David's fiancee returns and, denying his true nature, he rejects Giovanni for a 'safe' future as a married man. But when he meets Giovanni, a handsome Italian barman, the two men are drawn into an intense affair. On the morning of his execution, David tries to forget Giovanni but knows he never will.One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World'īaldwin's ground-breaking second novel, which established him as one of the great American writers of his timeĭavid, a young American in 1950s Paris, is waiting for his fiancee to return from vacation in Spain. Within a week, the police find him and he is sentenced to death.
Enraged, Giovanni strangles Guillaume with the belt of his dressing gown before running off into the night. To do this, he has sex with Guillaume, but this backfires when Guillaume arrogantly informs him after the fact that he can’t hire him. Before long, Giovanni leaves Jacques and tries to convince Guillaume to hire him again. With no money to support himself, Giovanni is forced to call Jacques, an older gay man who takes him under his wing and eventually has his way with him. When Hella arrives, David simply disappears without a word, leaving Giovanni in a state of panic. Returning home, Giovanni tells him that he would be at a loss without him, and though David comforts him in the moment, he refrains from telling Giovanni his plan to leave him when Hella returns to Paris. Unbeknownst to Giovanni, though, David is out having sex with a woman on that very night. He does this because Giovanni has stopped responding to his sexual advances, since he’s in what he thinks of as a committed relationship with David. One night, Giovanni’s life turns upside down when Guillaume fires him and publicly accuses him of stealing from the bar. From that point on, David lives with Giovanni, leading a happy existence even though Giovanni can tell that David has reservations about their relationship. At the end of the night, Giovanni convinces David to come back to his small room, where they have sex.
Giovanni explains this to David on the first night they meet, managing to entice David with his flirtatious charm. Without money or a worker’s permit, he couldn’t support himself until he met Guillaume, who gave him a job as a server at his bar in exchange for various sexual favors. When his first child died in the womb, Giovanni cursed God and decided to leave Italy, coming to Paris out of grief. Giovanni is a young, attractive Italian man living in Paris, and the first man with whom David has a long-term relationship.
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