Swimming in the Dark - Tomasz Jedrowski

An evocative coming-of-age story set in 1980's Communist Poland.

Swimming in the Dark is narrated by Ludwick, a new graduate from a university in Poland during the Communist era. He meets Janusz at a compulsory programme of farm labour for college students. When the programme is fnished, Janusz invites Ludwick to go camping with him and they fall in love. But when they return to Warsaw, their relationship is threatened by their diametrically-opposed attitudes to the Communist regime, and by the impossibility of both keeping their relationship secret, and of growing it.

This is an evocative book that captures the spirit and feeling of a specific place and time, while also depicting a story of doomed love. It's set in 1980, the year the shipworkers in Gdansk started a strike that turned into a nationwide protest movement. From the outset, the narrative captures how individuals are simply pawns in the Polish system. Ludwick's family are forced to move from Lwow (now Lviv) to Wrocklaw, “a city inhabited by the Germans for hundreds of years, [to] a flat just deserted by some family we'd never know, their dishes still in the sink”. The redrawing of borders is done at a stroke, like the children playing hopscotch outside the flat.

Similarly, Ludwick's landlady spends hours each day queuing at shops in an often fruitless search for food. When she becomes ill, Ludwick tries everything to get her some help and is blocked at each turn by the services that are meant to help but for which you have to pay bribes, or have a connection in the service who can exact influence. He eventually gets her an appointment at a private clinic, by two of Janusz's contacts, Hania and Makiso.

The children of a high-ranking army commander, Hania and Maksio get absolutely anything they want: a Mercedes, a country house, exam questions in advance, a luxurious and modern flat in town... Ludwick goes for dinner with them at one point and sees both the luxury of their life, and its temptations for others:

“Desert arrived, ice cream with chocolate sauce, topped with an absurdly big mountain of whipped cream...It was delicious. I felt like a child again, a happy one this time, whose wishes had always been granted. On the other side of the window night had fallen, and dark figures moved past in the street with downcast faces and empty bags, and empty stomachs, I guessed. But we didn't see them. It was so much better on this side of the glass. So much warmer, so much softer.”

Janusz wants to be one of the people behind that glass. He gets a job working for the Office of Press Control (the Office of Censorship, as Ludwick reminds him) and is proud of the work he's doing. He wants to use his friends' connections to further his career and to game the system. Ludwick despises the necessity of having connections – and of having to hide his sexuality – and he wants to leave for the West.

As for the boys' relationship, Swimming in the Dark repeatedly references Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin, a classic about the impossibility of maintaining a relationship between two men in 1950's France. Ludwick gives Janusz his copy of the book as a way of forming a bond and to signal his interest in Janusz. There are also some parallels between the text (in both, relationships start in late spring/summer and end in winter; in both cases, one of the men in the relationship is trying to suppress his sexuality by forming a heterosexual union). However, there are also parts where Jedrowski is writing against Baldwin's novella. While Giovanni's Room is set in Paris (and within the confines of the titular room in particular), Janusz and Ludwick fall in love in an idyllic, secret beauty spot in a forest, and their love is nourished in this rich and expansive space. There's a sense of freedom and effortless when they're there:

“Every time I swam I experienced the same elation I felt the first time I stepped into the lake, devoid of struggle, a feeling of weightlessness I hadn't thought I could feel.”

“We swam, fearless and free and invisible in the brilliant dark”.

Of course, when they go back to Warsaw, their relationship is confined to Ludwick's room, and it slowly breaks down. One of the factors that Ludwick identifies is that there are no role models for them that would show how a relationship between two men could work out (just as Jacques in Giovanni's Room tells David that his relationship with Giovanni will be over “in five minutes”).

I thought this was a really moving book. It's one of the few I've read about Poland during the Communist era, and the first I've read about a minority, and I feel like it shines a clear light on what that experience must have been like. The writing style is lovely too. I will definitely be looking out for more of Jedrowski's work in the future.

What I've been reading this week

I've been reading a little less than usual as it's a European football week, and I've been watching a lot of the games. However, I managed to make progress on Beatrice's Fate, which I will probably finish this weekend. I'll definitely be writing a review of this one as I promised the author that I would!

I did finish What Happens in the Highlands and, silly me, it's not the protagonist's friend's fiance who owns the castle, as I thought on Sunday, but the protagonist's love interest (and he actually owns two of them). The book does have some wonderfully romantic settings, but overall, it's ridiculous. There's a party, and of course it's full of lords and ladies and our idiotic heroine ends up curtsying to them! I'm going to review it, probably for Instagram.

I also started The Dutch House by Ann Patchett. It reminds me a lot of Anne Tyler's works, although it's about a story of rejection rather than the connected families that the latter usually writes about. I was a little disappointed in it at the start, but that's probably because I was expecting more of a highbrow literary read and this is more middlebrow, the kind of book you can pick up and read easily on public transport, with a gentle wit that makes it an enjoyable experience and carries the reading along.

Hope you have a good Friday and weekend. Speaking of highbrow, I'll be back on Sunday with some thoughts on two translations of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations.