Swimming in the Dark: A Poetic Literary Debut about First Love and Political Divides

Jedrowski mustered his good command of poetic language, captivating romance and conflict, and engaging discourse of homosexuality in authoritarian, Communist Poland. He’s great at giving off a cinematic feel for its historical context, landscapes of the foreign past, and characters subverting the corrupt system. A few bangers from the 70’s adds to the vibe as well. I liked how effectively written his characters are, especially our protagonist Ludwik, and his creative use of first and second person narratives. I am impressed coming to know that this is Tomasz Jedrowski’s debut novel. I look forward to his future works.

It’s an interesting read. Although we don’t really need yet another gay coming-out/coming-of-age story, the difference here is the compelling context of 1980s communist Poland. The writer offers an insightful take on why an everyday Pole might have bought into the system, while at the same time his lover wholly rejected it. The novel can be didactic and repetitive at times, the dialogue sometimes stilted, the grammar iffy in several places, the characters testing believability, but overall I’d recommend it.

In his debut novel, SWIMMING IN THE DARK (2020) author Tomasz Jedowski (born in 1985 in the Federal Republic of Germany) writes of first love set during the political turmoil of Poland in the early 1980s as Communist leaders began an increasing desperate and despotic attempt to hold on to power. The political setting of the novel plays an important role in the events surrounding the lives of the novel’s two main characters: twenty-two-year-old Ludwik Glowacki and a fellow student, Janusz. The two first meet as university students at a summer agricultural camp and although gay and closeted, pretty much inexperienced, and more than a bit cautious, Ludwick immediately is attracted to the masculine Janusz who Ludwik sees as “a prophecy I was unable to read.” Jedowski adopts an interesting and telling narrative technique for SWIMMING IN THE DARK. Ludwik is the book’s first-person narrator throughout and the novel is written as a letter to Janusz describing Ludwik’s life before meeting Janusz and, more importantly, detailing their lives after they meet. As early as the second page of the novel Jedowski lets readers know the relationship between the two central characters is, for one reason or another, doomed as he has Ludwik write, “I don’t know whether I ever want you to read this, but I know that I need to write it. Because you’ve been on my mind for too long. Ever since the day, twelve months ago, when I got on a plane and flew through the thick layers of cloud across the…

As the teacher of a course that deals, in part, with the rhythm and movement of prose, I was already intrigued in the first couple of pages of this small novel by just how inviting and engaging its prose was. By its third page, I'd stopped reading to investigate who might have done such a splendid job of translating the young Polish author's original into English. Well, NOBODY did! He did it himself, right from the get-go; he wrote it in English - which just happens to be his own FIFTH language!! (Now, how does that work exactly? How can it even be the case?) The English prose is not competent, not adequate, not merely good - it's beautiful: there's not a poor or dull sentence in it anywhere - and I've read it twice. The story itself is a gut-punch, and a hard one at that. The novel has 4-5 pages of blissful happiness when two young, very poor gay guys find themselves in each other and go camping. The rest of the book is about their trying to find ways just to survive and be themselves in those last wretched years of the Soviet control of Poland. Because the story itself is so convincing and the language's rhythm and flow so engaging, there's no partial investment in this story; if you're there with them at all, you're there 100% - which makes the experience of reading it better and the realities it depicts worse. READER: be advised! I consider the book something of a minor miracle. I don't know that it's "perfect" (whatever that might mean, exactly), but it's so good…

Some of the writing was very beautiful and touching. I recognized the flooding of Innocence and The growing up in the real world. I am hopeful that this is a new world in which people can just be themselves and love who they are.