Politics and intimacy collide constantly in Tomasz Jedrowski’s enthralling debut, which locates Ludwik and Janusz’s search for sexual and emotional liberty against a wider backdrop of a country struggling to define its own identity ... Although the novel’s moral compass is always clear—we remain firmly on Ludwik’s side, constantly hoping that he will stick to his principles and find a way to forge a safe, lasting relationship with Janusz—it manages never to be judgemental. Decisions that might feel like betrayals in a different context come across as simple acts of survival; and kindness often emerges in the most unexpected situations ... Jedrowski...uses a combination of precise plotting and careful slips in time to stretch the action of that single, fateful summer into a portrait of a country trying to come to terms with its past.
Swimming in the Dark has all the ingredients of the best coming-of-age gay love stories, but with its 1980s Eastern Bloc setting providing enough edginess to make it feel entirely original. Ludwik and Janusz’s arguments about opposing political systems are as relevant today as they were back then ... Jedrowski’s writing is elegant and compelling, and the revelations when they come are heartbreaking. I wallowed in all this book’s melancholy beauty, and will now keep it on my shelves alongside novels by Alan Hollinghurst, Edmund White and other classics in the gay canon.
This gay romance between two Polish boys living under Communist rule is as grand and gorgeously written, as passionate, as shot through with melancholy as anything by Edmund White or Alan Hollinghurst ... Swimming in the Dark is bound to become a queer literary classic, and its rather sweeping political dimension breaks new ground in the genre.
This lovely debut, weighing in at around 200 pages, has the hallmarks of a restrained mini-classic: In simple, heartfelt prose, Jedrowski sketches a powerfully erotic first love transformed by politics into a romance roiled by risk and ethical ambiguity ... 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.
Tomasz Jedrowski’s debut novel is an affecting and unusual romance, with a political undercurrent ... Jedrowski writes elegantly and evokes the emotional honesty that the lovers first thrive in, and then the grimly repressive machinery of the PUWP.
For his debut novel Swimming in the Dark, Tomasz Jedrowski manages to capture much of the graininess of his setting -– 1980s Poland in the iron grip of the Communist Party and later martial law – while conveying all the churn and throb and boom and bloom of innocence on the brink of experience ... shored up against the occasionally ill-defined moment are some brilliant set pieces ... Swimming in the Dark, in its angrier moments, might not burn with fire of a James Baldwin novel...but it does have the power to cast us back to, and perhaps even yearn, for the past. Even one we may have never had.
... seductive ... reads like a memory play ... Jedrowski’s exquisite novel vividly traces the life of immigrant Ludwik Glowacki ... Author Jedrowski does a superb job of delineating the painful necessity of choice, of vacillating between social and individual freedom. Ludwik’s melancholy memories make an indelible impression.
...an intricately structured coming-of-age romance ... There’s a tendency toward the figurative in the novel’s language that sometimes feels forced, but the claustrophobic interiority of Ludwik’s psychological turmoil elevates Swimming in the Dark to startling and moving heights. The looping in of Giovanni’s Room as a meta text also deepens rather than deflects from Jedrowski’s central themes ... instead of staging a political impasse between two men in love as a tragedy, Jedrowski adroitly provides readers with the pleasure of observing the development of a personal politics, Ludwik’s coming of age less a coming-out narrative than one of gradual radicalization ... The novel’s indelible complexity ultimately lies in its representation of a mind in conflict with the body.
An author who wishes to recall a history known to his parents, but outside his own experience, often has a hard time getting it right. He may brim with overconfidence about what life was like back then but may miss many of the subtleties ... [Jedrowski's] sensibilities mark him as a product of multicultural, super-diverse, LGBTQ-receptive England. He writes of his debt to a London writing group even though the narrative is set in Poland. He has been critical of a French gay publication for not treating gays as ordinary people. How then must he find life in Catholic, conservative Poland? ... The vibrancy of Swimming in the Dark is a love story that lapses when homosexuality cannot find space in the 1980s. Forty years later, the battle for that space, sadly, continues.
German born of Polish parents, debut author Jedrowski here writes in English, and his lyrical prose reveals a complete command of the language. Readers who enjoy this impressive work will eagerly anticipate the author’s next book. Highly recommended for all who enjoy a tale of love under the most difficult circumstances.
Debut novelist Jedrowski, born to Polish parents in Germany and now living in France, writes confidently in English—though his prose can turn overripe and his characters feel undernourished ... A broody tale of gay love and life behind the Iron Curtain.
Jedrowski’s dazzling debut charts an evocative sexual awakening and coming of age amid political unease in early 1980s Poland ... Readers will relish the indelible prose, which approaches the mastery of Alan Hollinghurst. Jedrowski’s portrayal of Poland’s tumultuous political transformation over several decades makes this a provocative, eye-opening exploration of the costs of defying as well as complying with social and political conventions.
