GIOVANNI'S ROOM

In this deeply felt interior novel, narrator Dan Butler captures the brooding nature of the main character, David, who is trapped in a coming-of-age crisis that lasts the length of the story. An ex-pat living in Paris, David finds himself in the midst of two sexual relationships--one with a woman and one with a man. Butler's rich baritone carries the lilt and rhythmic pacing of the dense, poetic prose that made James Baldwin famous. A novel with as much interior monologue as dialogue can be challenging to hold the listener's interest. Butler surmounts this difficulty by differentiating between David's inner thoughts and his complex outer world through variations in pace, pitch, and tone. Part family drama, part sexual discovery, this is a slow-paced story, driven by the trials of the main character across countries and continents. M.R. © AudioFile 2013, Portland, Maine [Published: JULY 2013]