Brief quotes give the text the veneer of nonfiction, and keep the narrative at arm’s length, rather than pull you close as fiction often attempts to ... We leave the pool in the novel’s second half, and are firmly anchored aboveground with Alice, diagnosed with dementia, and her unnamed daughter ... Otsuka’s prose is powerfully subdued: She builds lists and litanies that appear unassuming, even quotidian, until the paragraph comes to an end, and you find yourself stunned by what she has managed ... It’s in [the] dissonance that the novel’s halves begin to meaningfully cohere ... The puzzling narrative structure makes a kind of poetic sense as myth ... The Swimmers makes an archetypal story wholly personal ... In a time of monotony and chaos, when death is as concrete as it is unimaginable, and when cracks can and do appear in the pool for no discernible reason, The Swimmers is an exquisite companion. Though it doesn’t answer the unanswerable, the novel’s quiet insistence resonates: that it is our perfectly ordinary proclivities that make us who we are.
There is a minimalism to Julie Otsuka's work. The sentences in her slim books dive right into the details ... another artfully refined story, even when it delves into the most painful parts of life ... The book's chapters build upon each other but also hold the pleasure of complete, distinct stories ... Otsuka beautifully renders the particularities of a life fully using every word, including the pronouns. She has a way of presenting seemingly objective details, but the emotions seep through the minutiae so that we know and feel much about Alice and those who care for her. With virtuosity, Otsuka hands us each crystallized inch of this tale that reflects a life — the pages memorialize what can't be forgotten.
... a slim brilliant novel about the value and beauty of mundane routines that shape our days and identities; or, maybe it's a novel about the cracks that, inevitably, will one day appear to undermine our own bodies and minds; and — who knows? — it could also be read as a grand parable about the crack in the world wrought by this pandemic ... Otsuka's signature spare style as a writer unexpectedly suits her capacious vision ... You'd think the subjects here and this choral type of narration would make for a cold, impersonal dirge of a novel. Instead, The Swimmers has the verve and playfulness of spoken word poetry ... glides lightly through these philosophical waters, more lightly I think, than Cheever's metaphor-heavy short story did. But why compare? There's room enough for all in this Olympic-sized existential pool.
Though it may not appear that way initially, The Swimmers is a puzzle and must be approached as such. My revealing its secrets would rob you of the sinking realization Otsuka sets up for her readers. It descended on me incrementally: first, a few bewildering parallels, then a shocking relation, and then finally, an epiphany that turns the entire story on its head—one that I’m still grasping ... Despite its short length, The Swimmers is the sort of book that unspools. The content throughout is surreal enough to ascribe personal meaning to. It’s easy to imagine oneself making laps in that pool, to see one’s lost relatives in Alice’s bewildered face. Still, though, there is objective truth we cannot ignore: Western culture’s cold casting-out of the old, the echoes of atrocities that occurred on our soil not long ago, and the fact that, if you look for it online, you can find the name of Julie Otsuka’s late mother (Alice).
Otsuka’s new novel, The Swimmers, also opens in the first-person plural. The collective 'we' belongs to the regulars at a swimming pool in modern-day America. Compared with the torrent of lives contained in The Buddha in the Attic, the details dispensed via the same technique here can feel indulgently pedestrian ... The rest of the narrative follows one swimmer, Alice, a retired lab technician with dementia ... Otsuka deftly contrasts general truths about dementia with the unique experience of this individual and her family ...The second half implicitly invites us to read the pool and the crack as a metaphor for the glorious, consuming mundanity of daily life ... Alice’s story is compelling, full of well-placed details that form an unsentimental portrait of a woman ... But the two halves don’t mesh well ... Otsuka is a great writer and The Buddha in the Attic is a miraculous book, a micro-encyclopaedia of killer detail. The Swimmers, sadly, is not its equal.
From the collective group, Otsuka eloquently singles out one, a swimmer with dementia called Alice. The point of view shifts, now narrated by 'you', Alice’s daughter, who recounts her mother’s life through fragments of memories both prosaic and profound. The narration here is structured by repeating the clauses Alice remembers and does not remember, repetitions creating rhythmic incantation brimming with both authenticity and heart ... We, us, she, you—Otsuka’s multiple pronouns and points of view blur distinctions. Her wisdom is staggeringly beautiful, implicating each of us.
The cultish devotion among Otsuka’s swimmers sometimes strains credulity ... We get it: Pool people are all in. Hard core. But Otsuka...is up to more than mere amusement. A master of shifting perspective, she is preparing us for a rift. Just as the reader settles into this amusing, intimate study of a microcosm, a crack appears on the wall of the pool and the book makes a flip turn ... Otsuka treats the omen with humor, infusing the narrative with the absurdist quality of a small-town mystery ... Otsuka’s play with perspective can be slightly confusing. Sometimes it’s omniscient, sometimes more specific (maybe Alice’s daughter)? Ultimately it doesn’t make consistent sense ... Her packed paragraphs are often-thrilling compilations of detail, even when she’s just listing items lost at the bottom of a pool (cotton balls, wedding rings, German marks). The novel is filled with these tender assemblages, a declarative chorus of human tastes, memories and woes ... For all of its expansive details, The Swimmers is sometimes twee in its first half. Even as it deals with 'aboveground' troubles like dementia, the world of the book—speaking of lives suspended in water—feels a bit like a snow globe. Its often-captivating insularity can also be cloying at times. As in her earlier work, the heavier the themes, the more Otsuka’s language lifts off. Once we are squarely in Alice’s world, The Swimmers sparkles.
Elegant ... The new work is not as satisfying as previous novels, yet it contains scenes of emotional power sure to resonate with anybody who has cared for a loved one transformed by disease ... These chapters expertly demonstrate the way to introduce dozens of characters in a short amount of time. With delicate strokes, Otsuka shows how the pool offers 'a sense of comfort and order that is missing from our aboveground lives' ... Therein lies the beauty of the novel, yet also it’s disconnect. The Swimmers is a gorgeous yet bifurcated book, two exquisite halves tangentially connected to one another. Each half contains some of the most heartbreaking passages in recent memory ... The book’s two sections are each so beautifully written that one can’t dismiss the elements of this achievement that are so strong. In the end, The Swimmers is like that priceless vase: marred by imperfections, but very much a thing of beauty.
[Two] discrete parts are connected—and, for me at least, further muddled—by Ms. Otsuka’s striking use of pronouns. The opening sections are narrated with the first-person plural 'we.' But sections concerning the memory residence adopt the second-person 'you.' These are different voices, one choral, one individual, and it isn’t clear to me how they relate, or how they relate to the reader. This is a painful, personal story that feels oddly constrained by its formal conceits.
There are two main problems with Julie Otsuka’s new book, The Swimmers: A Novel – apart from its absurd cover-blurb, that is. Colson Whitehead sighs, 'Here comes the new Julie Otsuka novel, so we can begin to live again.' It’s difficult to know why mainstream publishers think this ridiculous kind of bullcrap is anything but embarrassing, but at least it’s easily ignored ... No, the first real problem is that The Swimmers: A Novel is not a novel ... The second problem is that, a few entirely unconvincing little wisps of reconciliation on the author’s part notwithstanding, there’s nothing connecting The Underground Pool with the book’s other stories ... is actually a pair of novellas lumped together under a bit of false advertising ... At every turn, they wallow in the quotidian plodding of a much-too-long New York Times Magazine profile piece ... There are some moving passages in a couple of the stories here about the undemonstrative creeping ravages of dementia, passages that will certainly resonate with readers who’ve gone through such things with a loved one. But since these passages are written in the completely flat affect of all autofiction, they’re unlikely to resonate with anybody who hasn’t gone through such things. There’s none of the reach or sweep of fiction in these pages, mainly because there’s precious little fiction in these pages ... Given revision and significantly more concentration on the author’s part, such a premise could be worked into a novel. But that’s hardly going to happen if we’ve got Colson Whitehead hyperventilating about how a lumpy, ill-sorted collection of author-jottings allows us all to live again, for Pete’s sake.
[A] slender but poignant portrait of a mind losing its grip ... The Swimmers is a subtler tale, one that reads like a riddle in parts — we cannot gather up all the pieces of the characters’ broken lives, but rather bear witness to their disorientation ... Divided into two very different halves, The Swimmers is structured a bit like a lateralized brain, with distinctly rational and emotional sides in melancholy dialogue with one another ... The prose is arid and disciplined as it describes the progressively complex dynamics that emerge between the pool’s habitual users. With skill she also teases out slivers of the swimmers’ irrationality ... It’s a laser-controlled piece of writing that slyly turns into allegory with the arrival of a problem at the pool — a crack ... One of the marvels of The Swimmers is its unshowy portrayal of the immense drama inherent in losing the mind before the body has expired. But perhaps even more impressive is its respect for the general confusion of living — a human condition which is omnipresent, with or without the ravages of dementia.
... a heartbreaker ... Written in the first person plural and then the vocative, the book offers switches of intimacy and mood. At the pool, an element of social satire is evident and embraced. But Alice’s story is inescapably tragic, a mother/daughter narrative of intimacy and and regret. Both halves are full of lists, accumulations of detail which Otsuka uses to convey brilliant flashes of identity and contemporary notes ... Otsuka’s intention and Alice’s destination are never hidden, the novel’s prose is never excessive, yet this narrative delivers immense power, in both its specificity and wider relevance ... Otsuka’s immaculate understatement renders afresh the ghastly transitions of the experience [of dementia], as well as the wider repercussions. Alice may fade but her after-image will not be so easily expunged.
There are books that seem as if they were written just for me, and Julie Otsuka’s The Swimmers is one of them ... I was half in love with this new novel before reading the first line ... In Otsuka’s signature style, The Swimmers is a grand pointillist narrative driven by the unrelenting accretion of details like dots of color filling up the canvas ... This approach to storytelling is not to everyone’s taste; those used to the more traditional narrative arc will pine for dialogue, scenes, heroes, and villains ... Though the prose style and structure bear the unmistakable characteristics of Otsuka’s earlier books, The Swimmers charts new territory.
... a quiet and startling masterpiece about memory, aging and the indelible experiences that define a life. The slim novel reads like a much longer one, its mere 192 pages giving rise to the possibility of infinite stories. The effortlessly musical prose will be familiar to readers of Otsuka’s previous novels, especially her 2011 bestseller, The Buddha in the Attic. But The Swimmers is even more structurally bold ... seems to continually reinvent itself as each section reframes everything that came before it. Reading something so inventive and playful is a bit like being inside an architectural blueprint as it’s being drawn, or watching an acorn grow into a massive oak in only a few minutes. This is not a simple, orderly, linear novel. It unfolds in a messy chorus of contradictory, unpredictable voices that each bring something different to the whole ... With nuance, grace and deep tenderness, Otsuka ponders the questions that define our lives: Who are we without our memories? What does it mean to truly see someone else, to see ourselves? What is knowable about the world, and what do we do with the mysteries no one can solve? Funny, moving and composed of sentences that read like small poems, The Swimmers is a remarkable novel from a writer with an unparalleled talent for capturing the stuff of the world, whether mundane, harrowing or bizarre.
... introspective ... Otsuka’s spare, dreamlike writing offers readers a deeply touching exploration of the impact on Alice’s Japanese American family (particularly her daughter) of caring for a loved one with dementia ... Otsuka is noteworthy for her skilled storytelling and her ability to immerse readers in her characters’ emotional journeys. Essential reading for those already familiar with Otsuka’s work; those who haven’t read her are likely to be duly impressed.
Otsuka is averaging one book per decade, making each exquisite title exponentially more precious. Here she creates a stupendous collage of small moments that results in an extraordinary examination of the fragility of quotidian human relationships ... Once more, Otsuka creates an elegiac, devastating masterpiece.
What unites the pool’s members is a reverence for their sport, for the mindless yet deeply mindful art of swimming up and down lanes, gulping for air between dips beneath the wet. Even as they’re all minding each other’s movements and surveilling each other’s little tics and choices, Otsuka’s attention to the somatic, to the solace of their solitary journeys in that man-made box of water, is, well, salient ... In a disarmingly frank parody of marketing speak, Otsuka exposes the way politeness is instrumentalized to justify the disenfranchisement of the elderly, a process as alarming as it is befuddling to imagine any viable alternative ... The Swimmers’s almost anthropological listing of so many disparate phenomena — from the accoutrements of suburban domesticity to the neoliberally deregulated but red-tape-smothered pool — offers satirical comment on contemporary life with nimble precision. Otsuka’s relentless inventiveness, delivered with such a light touch, shrouds the dark unease of her story in disquieting laughter.
A quick and tender story ... Otsuka cleverly uses various points of view: the swimmers’ first-person-plural narration effectively draws the reader into their world ... It’s a brilliant and disarming dive into the characters’ inner worlds.
The book begins as tart social comedy ... What seems a minor act of grace on the final day of operation [of the pool]...leaves the reader unprepared for the sharp swerve the novel now makes ... The combination of social satire with an intimate portrait of loss and grief is stylistically ambitious and deeply moving.
