On the Road with Penguin Classics · Penguin Random House UK

Giovanni’s Room with Caryl Phillips

January 25, 2024·1 hr 11 min·5 clips

Caryl Phillips argues that Baldwin's Giovanni's Room is ultimately about whether a person can fall in love — and that falling in love is the only way to truly face life.

Baldwin's Paris is built street by street. After the commercial material, the excerpt drops into that strange underwater feeling, where life seems to happen below while time moves on above. The mood is heavy and held in place. From there, the walk turns to Paris itself and asks how a city can press on private rooms. Mist softens the river and the stones. The host notices roofs, chimney stacks, alleys, dead-end streets, and the look of a place only half shown by weather. Geography becomes a way to read the book. The wider boulevards north of Versailles feel formal and regal beside the higgledy-piggledy, cafe-filled streets of Saint-Germain. That contrast matters because the places carry different kinds of pressure. Les Halles gives the episode its richest stretch. When David and Giovanni leave their taxi, Baldwin's market is choked, crowded, and packed with food. Paris has a literal belly: leeks, onions, cabbages, oranges, apples, potatoes, and cauliflowers. The old iron and glass pavilions, demolished in 1973, remain here as remembered appetite, noise, and traffic. Today's Les Halles is a Westfield, a modern oyster shell, but the place has not gone blank. The traffic, shopping, confusion, and commerce still echo the Paris Baldwin was writing through.

As heard by us

A sharply placed walk through Baldwin's Paris, where streets and rooms do as much work as argument.

Giovanni's Room becomes a walk through Baldwin's Paris, led by Caryl Phillips through the book's rooms, corridors, river mist, markets, and shifting neighborhoods.

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Why you'd press play

Walk Paris with Baldwin, through Giovanni's room and the streets that shape the episode.

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