Updated on second read (March 2025): This is just such a singular book. Reading this coming off of a Paris trip was perfection. I think I liked this even more on the second read. I’m fascinated by the borders between love/hate, lust/disgust, bravery/shame, and this has it all. David is a painful narrator because he’s so full of shame, but Baldwin is a genius in how he puts us into David’s head: only narrating his moments of intense obsession and deep (self-)hate, keeping Giovanni (and Hella for that matter) as a one-dimensional character without full subjectivity, skipping depictions of homosexual sexual intimacy — it’s a masterclass in unreliable narrators (and what they can give away through their concealment).