I could see its relevance, could see how it exposed the double standards of the West, how it showed racism and white supremacy behind the liberalism and democracy extolled by the capitalist powers.” Ludwik wants to write about Giovanni’s Room, but since the novel is not officially published in Poland, he chooses to write about Baldwin’s stories instead, contorting his analysis to please the communist literature department: “They dealt mostly with the Negro in American society, of his discrimination and shunning.
When they return to Warsaw, the two lovers continue their relationship discreetly as Janusz gets a job in the censor’s office, judging the suitability of books for public consumption, and Ludwik decides to apply for a graduate literature program. When we first meet Janusz, he’s a ladies’ man with an athletic build that makes farm work easy: “I didn’t want to be in the field of your power,” Ludwik confesses, “I envied your lightness and the beauty you carried with such ease.” But when Ludwik finds him swimming in a local river, something more is hinted at and a later trip blossoms into a sexual connection. The experience leads to an intense feeling of shame that would follow him as he grows up-from cruising Park Staromiejski in Warsaw to reading a black-market copy of Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room to meeting Janusz at an obligatory “work education camp” the year after college, where they are tasked with harvesting beetroots. There he meets Beniek, a boy with whom he would become infatuated and nearly kisses at a dance. The letter begins before Ludwik meets Janusz, when Ludwik is a schoolboy taking catechism classes.
To ease his pain, Ludwik decides to write a letter (“I don’t know whether I ever want you to read this, but I know that I need to write it”), mapping their relationship as well as his journey into accepting his sexuality and finding a way out of communist Poland. The news fills him with dread and he wonders what has happened to his lover, Janusz, who stayed behind. “Weeks of strikes and unrest” have forced the government to declare martial law. Swimming in the Dark opens with the narrator, Ludwik, in New York City in the 1980s, listening to a radio broadcast of the chaos that has come to his native country. One can’t help but think of all of this when reading Swimming in the Dark, the debut novel by Tomasz Jedrowski, a German-born Polish author living in France and writing in English. In the formerly communist country, 12% of LGBTQ people have been victims of physical violence and municipalities have taken steps to declare themselves “LGBT ideology-free zones.” This June, Polish President Andrzej Duda called LGBT rights an ideology more harmful that communism. Poland is a notoriously unfriendly place for LGBTQ people.
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