Swimming in the Dark (5*)

Tomasz Jedrowski had me fooled.  I could have sworn he grew up in the former Soviet Union and that he belonged to my generation.  Not so, he's German by birth (but undoubtedly a man of the world who cannily writes in the lingua franca of his literary idol, James Baldwin) and just 35 when this not quite tragic love story curtailed by Communism was first published in 2020.

Initially, I had Swimming in the Dark pegged as a lightweight romance overpowered by lovely simile (Your head was heavy, like warm marble, and your hair brushed my cheek. I was paralyzed by possibility, caught between the vertigo of fulfilment and the abyss of uncertainty) but little by little the re-creation of Polish life shortly before the Solidarity movement erupted, with its accretion of plot-relevant incident (an un-anonymous sexual encounter, a doctoral thesis that passes muster with the authorities because it uses American literature to expose the hypocrisies of capitalism) persuaded me that Jedrowski had far bigger ambitions.  In fact, his novel is a full-throated examination of how personal the political really is, particularly in a totalitarian state, and it makes the choices I faced coming out during the same period comparatively trivial.  After all, while I was watching Marcus Welby, MD on television with my mother, Ludwik was huddled around the radio with his own, listening to Radio Free Europe, terrified that the neighbors would overhear.

Ludwik loans Janusz a forbidden text meet while they're doing compulsory agricultural work (picking beets!) one summer.  Afterward, they enjoy a camping idyll, not the kind typically experienced by young American men.

The lake cleaned us every morning and evening. It washed off the sweat of summer and of lovemaking, maybe even the fingerprints on our bodies. And every time I swam I experienced the same elation I’d felt the first time I stepped into the lake, devoid of struggle, a feeling of weightlessness I hadn’t thought I could feel. During these days the shame inside me melted like a mint on my tongue, hardness releasing sweetness.

It's the memory of that isolated, Eden-like experience that binds them despite their growing political differences.  But while the focus remains on Ludwik's struggle for inchoate freedom, Jedrowski, like Baldwin before him, creates a world inhabited by other characters who don't share his sexual orientation.  In particular, his women transcend the "fag hag" category and act in ways that suggests he respects their own feelings and conflicts.  When Ludwik asks the daughter of a party apparatchik to do him a favor, it's ironically clear that Hania's own agenda factors into her cooperation as much as her sympathy. 

Swimming in the Dark is Jedrowski's first novel and he's stated that his second will differ completely.  I'm betting/hoping that it will expose the flaws of a free society--perhaps too much choice--as well as those of the country that his parents had to flee.