Ten out of ten and it hurt the whole way.

I read this in two nights in February and then lay awake for a third.

David is one of the great cowards of literature, and the terrible thing, the thing that gets you by the throat, is how completely you understand him. He does not hate Giovanni. He hates what loving Giovanni would mean about the shape of his own life, and so he goes, and a man dies of it. It is the oldest story there is, told in the cleanest prose I have read in years.

The sentences. Every one of them is weighted like something being handed across a jeweller's counter. There is no fat on it anywhere. And it is beautiful without ever being pretty; the beauty has knives in it.

The room itself. That little basement place with the wallpaper coming away and the window blocked up and the bricks in the yard that Giovanni keeps promising to do something with. I have not been able to stop thinking about that room. It is Shame, made into somewhere you can put a bed.

What I keep coming back to is that this was published in 1956, by a young Black American living in Paris, writing entirely about white people, and it is braver and more honest about desire than most of what comes out now.

Hella deserved better than she got. Giovanni deserved everything.

Ten. Go and read it. Not on a bad week, though.