Swimming in the Dark in Around the World in 80 Books

Jun 21, 2021 Daisy rated it it was amazing

Shelves: poland, aroundtheworld2021

These don't sum up this novel but the quotes below just made me think in a way I'd never thought before:

It was the same anger and weariness I'd observed in my schoolteachers, those who struggled to believe in the system yet punished others for doing the same. (For struggling or for believing?) (I think it's for struggling.)

At the office they ask me how I am every day, about a dozen times. It took me a while to understand why they were so baffled by my attempts to answer, to understand that my an ...more

Like · see review

Jul 18, 2021 Nina ( picturetalk321 ) rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: z-read-gelesen-2021, theme-m-m, a-reviewed, author-man, genre-fiction, author-white, zchallenge-eu, europe-poland

A gorgeously evocative novel, the best kind of literary fiction, about a gay relationship in 1970s Poland. The evocation of pre-Glasnost Eastern bloc life is wonderful; the textures, the clothes, the tastes, the ways in which people interacted: all terrific. A whole word rises up in front of the mind's memory. And there is a very Central European atmosphere here, with the hot summers spent in lakeside forests, mushrooming in the woods, Stalinist edifices in the middle of mediaeval townscapes. An ...more

Like · see review