“Giovanni’s Room” by James Baldwin: A book to shake you out of your comfort bubble

Once in a while, when I start feeling I have become too comfortably numb, I have a need to open the pages of James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room and shake myself brutally out of that bubble of comfort. Baldwin wrote Giovanni’s Room — as well as his first novel Go Tell it on the Mountain—in Paris, where he lived on and off for nine years trying to come to terms with his tumultuous relationship with the United States and looking for a respite from racial and sexual discrimination, a task not easy to accomplish in the 40s and the 50s. Paris is also where the story of Giovanni’s Room takes place. It traces the life of David, another American in Paris of the 50s, trying to come to terms with his sexuality, except for David, in contrast to his author, is white and not devoid of all the privilege that difference entails. David’s girlfriend Hella, whom he met and proposed to in Paris, has left for Spain to think about his proposal and make her mind about tying her future with David. <a href="https://medium.com/publishing-well/giovannis-room-by-james-baldwin-a-book-to-shake-you-out-of-your-comfort-bubble-9ada11fbf545">Click Here</a>