by Charlie Fabre
One of my favorite pieces of queer literature, Swimming in the Dark, definitely flew under many people’s radar and deserves more love.
Set in a declining communist Poland in the 1980s, Swimming in the Dark is a queer love story hidden in the shadows. Ludwik and Janusz meet at a summer agricultural camp. Both weary of each other at first, a camaraderie and exhilarating affair soon blossoms. They bond over reading an illicit copy of James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, but once back in Warsaw, their love grows cold. Pulled apart by the boiling political climate and their own ideals and desires, Swimming in the Dark is a beautiful novel about young love, growing up, and growing apart set in a hopeless world.
Because you were right when you said that people can’t always give us what we want from them; that you can’t ask them to love you the way you want. No one can be blamed for that.
I read Swimming in the Dark back in the summer of 2021 and it was the book that stuck with me most that summer for just how tender it felt to me.
I knew that reading a queer love story set in communist Poland probably wouldn’t have a happy ending, that it would probably bring about some feelings of emptiness and tears. And it did. But it also brought out a lot of beauty, and feelings of hope. This is Tomasz Jedrowski’s debut, and it is fantastic, filled with so much love and loss.
I can feel my heart pinching just thinking about it again.
No matter what happens in the world, however brutal or dystopian a thing, not all is lost if there are people out there risking themselves to document it. Little sparks cause fires, too.
The book is just under 200 pages, so I can’t really say too much without spoiling it, as the story is very tightly contained. However, a comparison I drew while reading Swimming in the Dark was that Ludwik and Janusz’s love story reminded me a lot of Achilles and Patroclus’ and I drew a lot of comparisons to the ways in which they were young and tender, but also perhaps naive and lost.
Just like Achilles and Patroclus, Ludwik and Janusz are both torn by their senses of duty – how to act and for whom to act – and this much is evident to the both of them. The lines of fate of their lives are each pulling them in separate directions but their affections blind them to the only possible ending that is to come.
I, as the reader, also knew this going in, and yet it really hit me hard, and the last few lines of the novel are packed with so much stunning and gut-wrenching emotion.
We kissed. You were mine. I realised then that this was the only thing that counted. Nothing else had ever existed.
Not only is Swimming in the Dark a beautiful and moving read, I think it’s an incredibly important one, especially considering the fight for LGBTQ+ rights that is still going on in Poland and other parts of the world. In many ways, Ludwik and Janusz got lucky, but we need to remind ourselves that so many are not.
The tragic queer love story, especially male, is a popular sub-genre, and while I am an advocate for happy queer love stories and spreading the joys of LGBTQ+ relationships, queer love faces more hardship than most and these feelings and qualms cannot be erased.
The title in particular speaks to this issue. Swimming in the Dark: with no light to guide, no map, no idea where you’re going, the depths below you, when you’ll reach the shore. In a world where your choice of partner and their sex, who you love, is made into a political statement and a crime, how do you know where to go? It’s like swimming in the dark, hopeless and terrifying and exhausting.
The odds had been stacked against us from the start: we had no manual, no one to show us the way. Not one example of a happy couple made up of boys. How were we supposed to know what to do? Did we even believe that we deserved to get away with happiness?
A really touching read, I’m surprised it hasn’t made more of a name for itself in the wider literary community on social media. I devoured it in one day because the protagonists really captivated me and their intense and tumultuous, and sometimes quiet, story had me on edge. I shed some tears and wrote down many quotes.
Jedrowski’s language is stunning and he is absolutely an author to be watching.
swim press 