Hi friends, welcome back to another video, my name is en and on this channel I
recommend LGBTQ fiction. I have today what I hope will be a
short really quick snappy "just want to recommend this one book to you"
conversation...except it's taken me a whole week to gather my thoughts about
this book that i just read, so who knows what kind of incoherent
nonsense is going to come out of my mouth!
I have a few notes, I've made a few bullet points to try and follow
to try and rein myself in a bit, but let's see if i succeed,
so the book I want to tell you about, as you can probably tell from the title of
this video, is Swimming in the Dark by Tomasz Jedrowski.
I read this last week...was it last week?
Days don't mean anything anymore!
I really loved it. I had to take a few days off after reading it
because I tried reading something else and then I had to give up and just put
it to one side and then eventually go back to something else but
it took me a full week to process my thoughts about it and I really want to
read it again, despite the fact that I've just read it!
If you don't know anything about it, it is about
Ludwik, who is in his early 20s and he lives in Poland
and he goes to an agricultural camp... oh I should have said this is set in the
80s, it's set in 1980 I think, okay back on track...
he goes to an agricultural camp the summer after finishing
university, something that everybody has to do, it's compulsory,
and there he meets Janusz. The form that it is written in is it's
written as a letter. It's written at some point in the future
and we don't really know when at the start of the novel when Ludwik is
writing to Janusz and we're not sure where he is and we're
not sure what's happened between them but he's writing him this letter. The way
it starts off is it starts in a really a really small minute way, it's really
very intimate at start, and the intimacy is not lost throughout, but it starts in
a really small way and the story starts to unfold when
he meets Janusz and that's when we
start to find out more about Ludwik's life, about his childhood, his father, his
mother, and his interests, his opinions about
Poland and the government and Poland's past, and that's where we
start to get a little bit more understanding. I think if you don't know
anything about history in former Soviet bloc countries,
you don't need to, I think it's all...
it's not explained in this book necessarily, but it's all there.
You will get to an understanding of it, I think.
When Ludwik meets Janusz that's when we start to get this sort of
unfolding of his story as it starts to
bloom outwards, and I think that one of the things that I loved so
much about this book is that kind of unfolding of the story when
you start with such intense intimacy, when we see a person really closely and
then you start to unfold it and include rich details about people's
history and about the history of the country and politics,
there is sometimes, I think, a tendency to over explain and do too much and that
kind of ruins the story a little bit. I think one of the brilliant things
about this novel, one of the things that I loved
so much, is the way that the intimacy is never lost, the way that
that kind of really difficult complexity, of gathering all of this information
and relaying it to you [clears throat with a mild cough]
don't worry it's not a persistent cough! The way that that is maintained
throughout, that intimacy is maintained, and
that connection that you have with the characters is never lost,
and I absolutely love that. I just thought it was so brilliantly done
especially for a debut novel. It's a debut novel! What?!
When Ludwik and Janusz return to Warsaw
we start to get a little bit more sort of unfolding
(I'm just going with this analogy now) we now get a little bit more unfolding of
their lives, we get a few more details of
their lives, we start to see the opposing political views that they have,
the opposing social views that they have,
and then the way that creates conflict between the two of them. I think
that's really brilliantly done because again I think sometimes there's
a tendency when you have novels that have characters who have very opposing
political views, there can be a tendency to have them
doing very extreme things and very extreme different opinions and
huge arguments and they don't and it's very subtle and even when
there's a tension between them, and there's anger, it dissipates very quickly
because they're very much in love with each other.
There is also this kind of passion which sees them through
some of the difficult questions that they might have with each other or
certainly that Ludwik has for Janusz, because it's all from
his point of of view. I really love the way
that's done. I absolutely love it.
This is the kind of story that I absolutely love.
It's like catnip in novel form for me. I love it.
The prose is so sparse the historical setting is created with actually very
little detail and it seems almost effortless but it's
so fully immersive and you just immediately immerse yourself in
it and immediately get drawn into this world and you know exactly where you are.
I love the way that it looks inside people's lives and relationships
in really intimate detail. The writing is just exquisite.
As I said, as soon as I finished it i wanted to reread it
and then I tried to read something else and I couldn't because I kept thinking
of it and I wanted to go back to it. The style of writing is so poetic and so sparse
I know I keep saying that but I really like that.
Nothing else has matched up since, and I'm gonna need to
take some time! There seems to be so
many stories set in England about queer people and I
really like to see views and lives outside of that
and this is absolutely fantastic. So, while I understand a lot of the history
and having been to some of the places
that the novel is set I feel like I understand a little bit and I can get a
handle on the geography and I can get a handle on the
understanding of the relationship but at the same time it's unlike anything I've
ever experienced in my own life and it's unlike anything
that I really know about and I really loved being able to delve
into that. I really loved the way that I was just drawn into these people's
lives and care so much about them. It's a really short novel so you can
probably get through it really quickly, but I really loved everything about it!
I'm starting to get incoherent now, I've gone off topic, off my points, I've not
covered most of them but i think I'm going to stop now before
I just ramble on! I would really like to know if you have
read Swimming in the Dark. If you have, let me know your comments below. If you
know other queer books set in Poland do let me know as well because I would
love to read more! thank you so much for watching, as always.
Do feel free to drop a comment below on absolutely anything I've talked about in
this video, I really love chatting to you all,
It's so wonderful to hear from everybody, and until next time thank you so much
for watching