Illusions of freedom
SWIMMING IN THE DARK by Tomasz Jedrowski (Bloomsbury, $36)
Buttery potatoes sprinkled with dill, the rich summer night above a black freshwater pond in the midst of a pine forest and the gasp of male bodies coming together to kiss. Tomasz Jedrowski’s Swimming in the Dark isa multi-textured first novel, filled with fresh sensations and emotional layers.
The “gay coming-of-age” literary genre is a recent invention. Discovering a difference from a social norm comes with excitement and anguish. Often it is a moment ripe with suspense, revelation, action and consequence. Edmund White’s 1982 book, A Boy’s Own Story, is a classic of the genre. Andre Aciman’s more recent novel, Call Me by Your Name, is another and became an Academy-award-winning movie in 2017, starring Timothee Chalamet.
Unlike Aciman’s book, where sensual tensions resonated against the backdrop of a wealthy literary family and an estate in Italy, Swimming in the Dark is largely set in Poland in the tumultuous years of the 1980s. It is a country fractured by the failings of the Communist dream.
The novel begins, however, in New York, where Ludwik, now an American resident, hears news of martial law being imposed in his homeland. The events across the Atlantic fill him with both regret and nostalgia. Memories cannot be resisted.
In 1980, at a summer holiday camp in their final student year, Ludwik had met Janusz. They were part of a team helping bring in a beet crop for a state farm — days of work but evenings of conversation and music. Handsome Janusz, popular with girls and the centre of a group, seems like an impossible vision to Ludwik. But Janusz invites Ludwik on a post-camp hitchhiking trip and a romance begins that must be kept concealed from both their friends and the authorities. The first tentative mutual steps of desire have been answered and Ludwik falls in love. They continue to meet upon returning to Warsaw.
Jedrowski deftly poses the wonder of a first romance against the background of a nation in economic distress. The upper levels of the political apparatus, however, have access to special services, lavish banquets and luxury drinks like scotch and champagne. The boys’ affair becomes inescapably entangled in a corrupt world.
Ludwik discovers the respiratory illness of his beloved landlady but has no ability to get the Western medicines that would cure her. By small steps, he also becomes complicit in this state-withina-state. But being gay seems to have no place in this world, either. Only the West seems to offer the illusion of freedom.
Swimming in the Dark is deceptive. It can be easily read as a story of first love, but it offers so much more. Jedrowski uses an illicit smuggled copy of James Baldwin’s gay novel, Giovanni’s Room, to add additional resonances to the story and there is an unforgettable moment of freedom dancing to Blondie’s Heart of Glass amid the corrupt decadence of the Polish ruling apparatchik.
Apart from a few overwritten phrases, the novel is hard to fault. The set scenes — the first midnight swim, the romantic meetings, the champagne party — are superbly delineated. Jedrowski is skilled at recreating the past with exact detail. The book resonates with authenticity.
Swimming in the Dark is a romantic, finely pitched, evocative story.