A book of love in a time and place that forbade it
“Swimming in the Dark” is a lovely debut, weighing in at around 200 pages and bearing the hallmarks of a restrained mini-classic: In simple, heartfelt prose, Tomasz Jedrowski sketches a powerfully erotic first love transformed by politics into a romance roiled by risk and ethical ambiguity.
Set in 1980s Poland, when the Soviet-controlled Communist regime faced an existential challenge by the prodemocracy Solidarity movement, the story centers on Ludwik. As a 22-year-old, he crushes on Janusz, a handsome free spirit he meets at a summer camp that features compulsory beet harvesting rather than archery and boating. The two extend their summer with a camping trip in the Polish woods, swimming under moonlight and carrying on like the swooning lovers they are.
It’s an idyll so perfect that it’s bound not to last. Being gay in Poland in that era was more or less unmentionable, a fact that Ludwik resents and Janusz accepts. As the two head in different ideological directions, their love fades and flares.
Interestingly, Ludwik comes close to compromising his liberal Western leanings when it comes to getting party approval for his graduate studies in literature.
German-born to Polish parents, Jedrowski writes in English. He remains in admirable control of his story. His lovers are ardent and passionate, not sappy. He avoids the mistakes one often sees in debut novels. The draconian measures used by authorities to discourage homosexuality in Communist Poland are frightful, but not so different from the harsh antigay bias prevalent in America just a few decades earlier.