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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