“Swimming in the Dark” by Tomasz Jedrowski is a love story of sorts, set against the backdrop of the Solidarity protests in Poland in 1980. Ludwik, a young man from a provincial city who is struggling to come to terms with his sexuality, meets Janusz, a charismatic and charming man who draws Ludwik in and pushes him away as they navigate their dangerous attraction. When Ludwik seeks a position studying for his PhD in Warsaw, he is drawn into Janusz’s circle of friends, searching for a way to curry the influence needed to secure the position while maintaining his moral compass under an authoritarian system where power and connection are the currency of hope.
I’ll admit that I picked this audio book because I liked the narrator’s voice in one of my favorite audio books from last year, “Good Spirits” by B.K. Borison. In that book, Will Watt narrated Nolan Callahan, an Irish ghost of Christmas Past sent to haunt Harriet York, a hapless Baltimore antique store owner, and I thoroughly enjoyed his performance. And his performance is very good in this production as well, at turns warm and aching as Ludwik faces challenge after challenge to guard his heart and his soul.
But what kept me listening was the poetic language, and the setting. I remembered a bit of the history — I was 11 years old and living in West Germany when the first protests in Poland happened, and I followed the news of Lec Wałęsa and the union’s fight against authoritarianism until the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989 and 1990. Ludwik’s mother and grandmother secretly listen to Radio Free Europe and teach him some of the hidden history of Poland that led to its capture by the Soviets at the end of World War II. As the story progresses, the compromises that Ludwik and Janusz have to make become the tragic heart of their doomed love.
Ludwik narrates the story from exile in New York City, watching the news of the 1981 martial law from America. His descriptions of seeing tanks on the streets of his youth, of marches and protests in places dear to his heart, immediately draw me to the present situation in Minneapolis, where we have 3,000 paramilitary “agents” enacting an ethnic cleansing on our streets. I see streets and parks that I know enveloped in tear gas, I see masked men attacking children at our neighborhood schools, I see (and often join) people standing on corners and bridges holding signs demanding that the unwelcome visitors leave. And then I sit down in the evening to read the news from around the world (my RSS reader gives me German, French, and Dutch stories as I work on my language skills), and see those places again reflected back to me in foreign words. It’s a strange and unsettling feeling, and I can feel Ludwik’s unease in myself.
