The punishing midsummer heat turns into a sort of blessing when the seemingly uninterested Janusz asks Ludwik on a trip to Poland’s lake district before starting his job in the Office of “Press Control” (in the heaviest of inverted commas). The two meet on a state-enforced agricultural retreat where for a week, along with a troupe of other graduands, they are tasked with uprooting beets for hours on end. A bit like using a state-of-the-art camera to take an early photograph a twenty-first century Stieglitz.įor 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 an innocence which for the 22-year old shy bibliophile Ludwik seems to extend beyond the beginnings of his first relationship, with the self-assured and problematically patriotic Janusz.
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