Author: minorhistory

a place i’ve only seen in pictures

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Cobey Rokes, 2024, monochrome motif records

CD cover of a place i’ve only seen in pictures by Cobey Rokes, monochrome motif records

When I ask people about music they listen to, for the most part I get one of two answers. The first is that they listen to music from their teenage years or music that played during their teenage years from another era — music that if they listened to in a physical format would be worn to the point of oblivion. The second possible answer is that they listen to what they describe as soundtracks. They often encounter these soundtracks as part of the sonic landscape of the video games they play. They then detach the music from the video games and carry it around with them in their headphones. What once scored a video game now becomes the soundtrack to their life. It still surprises me to chat to a group of young people and learn that they spend a substantial part of each day listening to post-classical and orchestral music. It is within this growing landscape of post-classical music that composer Cobey Rokes released his latest album a place i’ve only seen in pictures, an album I’ve had on heavy rotation for the last few weeks.

In a place i’ve only seen in pictures, Cobey Rokes takes us on a journey he’s never been on through a sonic exploration of images from places he’s never visited, from lives he’s never lived. This concept seems fitting for a heavily image-based culture. Whether we realise it, we spend substantial time projecting ideas onto images we see. We attach importance and emotions to rectangular representations of other people’s lives — images that both amplify our desires and fill us with dread.

a place i’ve only seen in pictures demonstrates a dynamic compositional range. As Above So Below opens the album with the anticipation of the adventure that lies ahead while tracks like Nostalgia Hangs provide more self-reflective moments. The high spirits of A Glimpse into Our Past dissolve into a set of sonic questions that give rise to further questions in the repetitive patterns that define Reminding us of Days. It’s testament to Cobey Rokes’s compositional ability that Reminding us of Days manages to resolve this underlying darkness in such a satisfying manner. Tired Bones concludes the album with echoes of the initial promise of adventure that seems more informed by the experience of a life lived.

Cobey Rokes provides us with the sonic imprint of images without providing the images themselves, leaving us little choice but to go out into the world and project his soundscapes onto our own images. In doing so, a place i’ve only seen in pictures becomes intertwined with our own lives, lived and imagined.

You can grab a copy of a place I’ve only seen in pictures on Bandcamp.

Why no one reads books anymore: a portrait.

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The Literature Express by Lasha Bugadze

a white rabbit living beside a petrol station

Works of Georgian literature in translation are few and far between. The English-speaking world appears to have little interest in classical or emerging writers from the Caucasus region. Lasha Bugadze’s The Literature Express was the first Georgian novel I’ve encountered in English. I picked it up in the museum shop at a Karlo Kacharava exhibition. If there had been other Georgian novels in English, I would have picked them up too. 

The Literature Express follows the trials of a short-story writer Zaza, who has been selected to represent Georgia along with a poet Zviad on a European-wide train journey of literary figures from the different European nations. While Zviad is quite well known and widely published, Zaza has published one collection of short stories that did not sell well. Zaza’s selection for the literary expedition ruffled feathers in Georgia. Many posited that his mother’s position as Vice President of the Georgian Chess Federation motivated his selection over more-established and well-published writers. 

The novel begins in Tbilisi sometime after the Russian invasion of Georgia and subsequent occupation of north-Georgian territories starting in August 2008. The story also starts at the end of Zaza’s relationship with Elene, who seemed to have been aware she was wasting her time paying rent and living to serve a man-child. Despite the dysfunctions of their relationship, it took Zaza sleeping with another woman he met on Skype for Elene to leave him. Georgian women are not portrayed as having high expectations from their men: Zaza’s own father’s attitudes and behaviour parallel his own, with his mother functioning as the only adult in the family.

The train journey starts in Lisbon and ends for the Georgians in Poland because they cannot obtain Russian visas due to the fallout from the war. The other passengers continue as far as Moscow, later regrouping with the Georgians in Warsaw and then onward to a ceremony in Berlin where they announced the winner of a literature contest the organisers had set for the passengers along their journey. 

Zaza, our narrator, makes little effort with anyone around him. No one is worth getting to know. He is cynical about the entire exercise and quite misanthropic. Zaza seems shocked and disgusted that other writers on the train write. He does not write much in the novel, even after the announcement of a literary competition on the train. In his life before the train journey, he didn’t seem to write much either. Quite quickly, the entire novel turns its attention to Zaza’s pursuit of the wife of the man who would also become his translator. The big twist in the final few pages might have delivered a bigger blow if Zaza had been sympathetic enough to get invested in. In this regard, the plot and Zaza’s narration of events failed to deliver anything above the infantile. 

Each chapter has a section in italics narrated by a different person on the journey, yet these secondary narrators often share Zaza’s voice and cynical outlook in life. A passage in the voice of an older French female author who writes to her sister about her ongoing affair with a young Belorussian writer is probably the novel’s biggest literary failure. The letter is lost to the fact that it is presented without any previous character development and carries no distinguishable style or voice despite being penned by a woman of letters. She’s just Zaza with female body parts.

As this novel involves the author writing in the voice of a character who is also a writer, it can be hard to resist attributing Zaza’s attitudes and opinions to the author himself. The novel takes a cynical view of the modern literary landscape with its childish gimmicks, jealousies, and political bandwagons. A lot of commentary centres around everyone’s envy of one Bulgarian author who had a story published in the New Yorker, with frantic speculation and clinical dissection of the tactics he employed for him to be palatable to such an audience. 

The novel feels like an attempt at a joke about a writer capitalising on the momentary western interest in the plight of the Georgian people during the aftermath of the Russian invasion. It reads quite meta because that is precisely what the author did in writing this novel also. The formula of including stereotypes from all European nations on a pan-European journey against the political backdrop of 2008’s Russian invasion seems designed more for western consumption than for local Georgian consumption. As true as some of the commentary is about the state of modern literary institutions and the cut-throat figures climbing over one another to get published, The Literature Express fails to deliver much substance past its commentary.

Throughout the novel Zaza invokes ‘Georgian’ without ever demonstrating what that means. ‘Georgian’ is construed as negative, insular, and conservative. Zaza laments that the Georgian language fails to capture the ecstasy of erotic life, having only the banal ‘entering’ or vulgarities to describe sexual intercourse. However, there is one alleged sex scene in the novel and the author doesn’t extend the range of the Georgian literary imagination during this act. Perhaps the vocabulary would grow richer if writers wrote better. 

The author’s motivations in this novel remain debatable. He made Zaza a lazy, vapid, neurotic, self-obsessed, dull, horny nepo baby. He had him cry that there are no readers in Georgia yet he takes us on no literary journey within himself. Zaza laments illiterate writers and poets yet doesn’t demonstrate a desire to read either. Zaza doesn’t talk about any writers he admires or idolises. The author portrays modern writers as largely hostile, self-centred, jealous egoists, Zaza included. He devoted the majority of the plot to the pursuit of a vapid woman. Towards the end of the story, Zaza says “I’m a third-rate character and novels are never written about the likes of me” – was that the exercise? Either all these choices were intentional, and if so, why? Otherwise they might be a mirror of the author, a demonstration of the full range of his abilities.

The scenes from the novel evoked the question: why would anyone want to spend time reading if these are the writers of our time? It’s easy to argue that the author’s motivations might have been to express: there are no longer readers precisely because of the career-motivated characters like the protagonist. However, it’s also hard not to view this very novel as career motivated. Even if that was the author’s intent, there are still more enjoyable ways to do it.

This novel is the literary equivalent of Natasha Bedingfield’s Unwritten.

By association

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Everyone I know and love has been chewing over the Epstein files today.

Cate Blanchett! On one hand there’s a chance that Blanchett never came close to Epstein. She might have crossed paths with him in social terms as no more than an extra on a set of dodgy characters. If she did know him, there’s a chance she remained unaware of what was going on around her, of why she’d been invited to the party. Perhaps by inviting Cate Blanchett along and treating her with respect, Epstein and friends preserved their appearance in the same way that Apple, Google, and Facebook incorporate in Ireland rather than infamous Caribbean tax haven – Ireland is a corporate tax haven that provides a veil of legitimacy to preserve their appearance. Perhaps they used her to trap other women. If Cate Blanchett seemed safe, she projected an illusion of safety for vulnerable women.

On the other hand, there is no profession more cut-throat than the arts. Get anywhere close to the arts and quite quickly you bear witness to Macbeth levels of political ambition. People are willing to sell their souls to progress from small-town-Ireland to small-city-Ireland, not to mind what they’d would do for an opportunity to make it big on the biggest stage in the world. And Cate Blanchett is at the top of the very top.

Interesting.

Unsympathetic characters

Posted on by minorhistory

Narrating an entire novel through the eyes of an unsympathetic character is an interesting move. In a world of pound-shop psychoanalysis, it’s easy to assume that an unsympathetic narrator is a reflection of an unsympathetic novelist. Can a kind-hearted novelist sustain such a voice for such a long time without getting the ick? Without any deliberate signals to the reader, can we trust that the novelist is self-conscious enough to recognise that other people think differently to him? What does it mean to get to the end of a novel and find that the unsympathetic character comes out on top?

Writing Poetry with Carol Ann Duffy – BBC Maestro

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How Stuff Works

If you have an Instagram account and post photos of books, like photos of books, or follow people who like or post about books, chances are that you’ve been bombarded with ads for the BBC Maestro course Writing Poetry with Carol Ann Duffy. I asked a few of my female friends and all of them had seen the course advertised and all of them were tempted. As far as I know, I’m the only one who bit the bullet and bought the course. Fools and their money…

I completed the course over the month of December. By completed, I mean I watched all the videos, made extensive notes, and looked through the accompanying PDF.

Writing Poetry with Carol Ann Duffy focuses less on the specifics of poetry and more on the different entry points to start your creative writing journey. If you’ve ever taken a creative writing class of any substance, you probably have worked through similar course material, received similar advice, and complete similar exercises. If you’ve never taken a creative writing class, this is as good as it gets. If you follow her suggestions and complete the exercises, you’ll get as far as you can with help. Everything else is up to you.

While the manual defines common poetic structures, Duffy herself doesn’t focus on the technical aspects of poetry. The main constraint that she employs on her own poems, she tells us, involves the line numbers per stanza. She maintains the same number of lines per stanza throughout her poems to define the size of her canvas.

Depending on where you’re at, this course might be for you.

Restoration dialogue with a Hibernian twist

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Actress by Anne Enright

At one point in Taylor Smith’s Miss Americana, there’s a montage of scenes from her previous album tours. Each tour is a world apart from the previous. The entire performance is rechoreographed. All costumes, sets and dancers are reimagined. Swift tells us that female artists must reinvent themselves constantly to remain relevant, to remain palatable. At the time of filming Miss Americana, Swift was 29 and fully aware of her impending expiration date. She knows she’s on borrowed time. Regardless of the work it took to reach such heights, most female artists either fade or crash out of view after a certain age. A lucky few move into production roles. Female writers might be spared to some extent, but as Anne Enright has documented, very few female writers break through in the first place.

Taylor Swift is one of a long line of global stars. Her tribulations play out in real time on a billion small screens around the world. The global star phenomenon is relatively recent. In her latest novel, Anne Enright explores the life one of the first generation of global stars, Katherine O’Dell, who came of age in the post-war era and was an Irish theatre giant of her time. She performed on the West End, Broadway, and in Hollywood films. The story begins with O’Dell long dead, her later years mired in controversy. When Holly Devane, a postgraduate student arrives at the home of O’Dell’s only daugher Norah, she amuses and annoys Norah in her attempt to label Katherine O’Dell’s “sexual style”. This confrontation compels Norah to tell her mother’s story.

Enright’s Katherine O’Dell reads like a metaphor for the modern Irish state. We begin with the revelation that O’Dell was born in London to English parents – a fact that managed to remain out of the public domain. O’Dell’s father was the son of a British solider in Fermoy. Her father’s Catholicism functioned as the main cultural connection to Ireland. O’Dell came of age in the post-war period in the years in and around the declaration of the Irish Republic. She concocted her own Irish identity as a teenager on tour around Ireland with her actor parents on the rural theatre circuit. In a stage review of a Broadway show, a critic referred to her as O’Dell rather than her mother’s surname Odell. “Odell” went through a similar process of transliteration – an Anglophone’s impression of an Irish name – that all Gaelic surnames suffered at the hands of British colonists. As her star rose, she played an Irish woman so well she passed as Irish. No one ever questioned her Irishness. She became the global idea of Ireland, starring in butter ads and singing at Irish emigrant events. Later in life, after the major incident that led to her demise, a Garda from Gweedore reported that she spoke to him in a gibberish she claimed was Irish. Her gibberish, the Garda said, was a fairly good impression of the Irish language.

Some people are born stars. O’Dell had early opportunities to emerge as she stepped in to replace actors on her parents’ tour. The other players recognised her for what she was. She arrived in the acting world fully formed. She understood how to work the camera better than the directors. When she stepped out on stage, everything fell into place. Despite her rare gift, like every woman, she too had an expiry date. She left America for Ireland with a small, “privately” conceived child that does not appear to be the product of her stage-managed marriage to a gay co-star.

Enright’s novel moves recursively through key events and characters as Norah tries to make meaning of her mother’s life. In telling the story of Katherine O’Dell, Norah tells her own story. Norah cycles through a series of concerns, her unknowable paternity, her mother’s mysterious sexual life, the men that gathered around her in support and in judgement, and the bizarre event that led to her mother’s incarceration.

Taylor Swift knows she’s on borrowed time because of the Katherine O’Dells who went before her, their lives carefully studied and deconstructed. No solution has been found or proposed for the fact that our culture has an appetite only for young females. Half the Internet’s energy consumption goes into serving up images of young females, with an ever sliding scale of how young. We’ve long been sold the idea that the global market functions as some objective measure of value. Blame for something so abstract isn’t easily assigned. The market wants what it wants, we are told, as if we have no hand in the fine tuning and marketing of wholesale desire.

O’Dell makes failed trips back and forth across the Anglo-American world. She goes on smaller touring circuits. She is stubborn and ego-centric. At the same time as she finds herself written off as expired goods, male figures install themselves in the arts and literary world without having to work to maintain their position. These men emit no creative light of their own. They never deem themselves too old or undeserving of any pleasure or opportunity. They build their own empires off networks of artists. They manoeuvre themselves into positions where O’Dell has to seek their permission to work. They sit behind the camera and whisper about her and dismiss her. They laugh at her attempts to reinvent herself. She succumbs to heavy drinking and a cocktail of prescription medication.

Norah keeps pushing and uncovers a source of darkness in O’Dell’s past. In true Irish fashion, blame remains nonassignable. Even during Katherine O’Dell’s trial, responsibility for her own actions is diminished. Injustice seems societal and unspecific. Enright writes injustice into the very air we breathe.

Every now and again, Norah speaks directly to a “you” – her husband. Their union seems like the centripetal force tethering Norah to a life of stability compared to her mother’s. The “you” of this novel had encouraged Norah to write about her mother. The “you” of this story gave her permission. This reminds me of ancient Greek novels I studied such as the Aethiopica, where the story is female driven, but all successful female characters had a network of supportive men guiding them at all times. Women like O’Dell, who lived without male blessing, had negative outcomes.

O’Dell and Norah’s story unfolds to reveal not only their own story but a cultural history of Dublin. Each scene, sentence and phrase builds an impression of modern Ireland with all its porter bellies and rebel tunes. Enright’s writing style comes close to achieving what Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk does in his novels: a gentle unfurling of the soul of a nation disguised as a book.

Is that all there is?

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Diving For Pearls by Jamie O’Connell

The plot of Diving for Pearls centres around the death of Hiyam, a young Emirati woman. The novel flows through the voices of several characters. Through them, we discover her fate. For the most part, Diving for Pearls concerns itself with the actions and choices of one Irish family. The heart of the novel rests within the shifts of consciousness in Trevor, the troubled younger brother of Siobhán. Siobhán summons Trevor to Dubai where she has been living with her husband and children since the 2008 economic collapse. Like the dead Emirati woman, Trevor too ended up in open water as a result of a misspent evening. Siobhán thinks she can save Trevor without realising that she’s more lost than him.

Dubai feels like something out of a Mark Fisher book. It manifests as an expression of pure capitalist realism. Within its city limits, the global caste system is on full display. Public space is so inhospitable that if you attempt to spend time outdoors, you risk being seared to death by the sun. Refuge of any sort can be found only within the private shopping malls and hotels.

While O’Connell writes complex Irish characters, the foreign characters lack a certain dimensionality. On this point, I give O’Connell the benefit of the doubt. Diving For Pearls seems less interested in rendering characters’ rich inner worlds than in demonstrating that for every northern indulgence some southern family pays the price. This book has strong parallels with Jordan Peele’s film Us, where the Wilson family confronts the horror of their doppleganger family. The Wilson’s material gains result in torment and hardship for their counterparts who exist in a parallel underworld. O’Connell’s characters of non-white descent suffer endlessly and needlessly so that the white characters’ good fortune continues.

Within this novel, those with money are godless while the impoverished are pious. The worship of both capital and god relies on higher powers. These higher powers remain abstracted and unaccountable but widely believed. In the end, everyone relies on little more than hope. As Siobhán’s good fortunes flip from one moment to the next, in what is a comical scene, she tries to remember how to pray. In Diving for Pearls, Christianity provides a quiet sense of community. The Christians of diverse nationalities gather together to worship but also to commune with one another. The consumers seek individuals with whom they can binge in tandem. Both have a price.

O’Connell’s writing becomes urgent and compelling when he writes about faith. This seems a feature of the latest generation of Irish artists. While their fluency in Christian doctrine probably came through involuntary indoctrination, its immutable presence shapes their art. O’Connell’s writing expresses a final exhalation of Irish Christianity.

The Siobhán of this novel embodies the archetypal sleepwalking consumer of capital. She names her children Rocco and Milo after the new global deities. When Trevor enquires about the palpable inequality evident in Dubai, she’s quick to rationalise this as a law of nature. Someone has to slave! A certain comedy arises when Siobhán passes comment about Gete, her Ethiopian housemaid whose prospects of making a living in her homeland were robbed by foreign interests and whose entire fate rests in Siobhán’s hands. Siobhán thinks Gete fails to understand what is important in life, aka designer goods. Gete, knowing better than to ever comment, seems pregnant with opinion.

When Siobhán drags her family out to witness an actor scale the Burj Khalifa, the supreme moment of bearing witness fails to offset the discomfort of the voyage. Worship stripped of its religiosity splits Siobhán open for a moment. She realises that her entire life has been built on a lie; she chose luxury over ever knowing true desire. Her life’s milestones are garnished with disappointment. Nothing in her life has lived up to the hype. After this brief confessional moment, she returns to normal. Despite experiencing a great change in fortune, she doesn’t have the wherewithal to become conscious of the source of her malaise. Siobhán, as an embodiment of the general Irish population, and some might argue the entire global north, demonstrates comedic acts of cognitive dissonance.

Dublin and Dubai fail to differ enough to draw a strong contrast. Moving thousands of miles from one to the other offers distance rather than difference. For Trevor, Dubai might lead to a life post-Lucy Quirke. For Aasim, Dublin allows him the liberty of sharing a bed with a man without fear but also without love. Outside of that, both men know nothing but excess. Trevor tries to steel himself through building a thick muscular exoskeleton. Aasim flashes money to court friendships.

The one question I have is whether O’Connell could have written Diving For Pearls without Trevor. While O’Connell animates Trevor’s awakening with great skill, Trevor reads like a metaphor for the Labour Party or the American Democratic party. Although his lifestyle leads to the death and destruction of the global south, he retains the capacity to display some awareness and remorse. He understands the ills of the world enough for the rest of us to buy into him as a form of hope. Ultimately, he might change course but the change isn’t radical. A Diving For Pearls without a Trevor to add empathy would have been more realistic but less palatable.

Siobhán’s husband Martin remains voiceless throughout the novel. Everything that happens, happens because of his sense of entitlement. His shady dealings both stand up and tear down the lives of Siobhán and the boys. Martin lies beyond reach. He is both guilty and conscious of his actions. He may not mean to murder but he still robbed Hiyam of her life. Capitalism doesn’t mean to tear the planet to ribbons. The destruction of life and the environment is an unfortunate byproduct. Following the same natural order that necessitates modern slavery, Martin will never see the inside of a jail cell. His steady cash flow tethers him positively to his offspring even after all he has done. Even after her confrontations with reality, Siobhán continues to accept his money. The entire planet will plunge into flames and every one of us will die before Martin’s air conditioned apartment will experience mild brownouts. Martin represents everything that happens in the shadows. Deep down, we all know that the deals that Martin makes keep the known world spinning on its axis. Deep down, we’re all varying shades of Siobhán. In a metaphorical sense, we all choose Martin. If ‘he’ were to stop, some of the global north’s luxury would cease to exist. Martin goes unprosecuted because to prosecute Martin would mean confronting our own culpability.

Nothing is real. Nothing is certain or eternal. As quick as all this has been created, like Sodom and Gommorah, it can come undone. As much as Emirati wealth can couch them in luxury, the bodies still pile up. Sometimes they find their own family members among the casualties. As the fire grows nearer, the smoke will engulf us all.

What a masterful first novel from Jamie O’Connell.

The last failure of 2021

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On not finishing Spill Simmer Falter Wither

My friend Joanne lent me a stack of books in 2019. The stack remains on my shelf since the last two years have robbed me of opportunities to return them to her. This stack introduced me to Rebecca Solnit, who I then binge read for the rest of 2019. The stack also contained a few from Tramp Press, a few book-shaped literary journals, as well as Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends. I read the back of Conversations with Friends and deemed myself unqualified either to read or weigh in on Rooney. I have read Normal People. I’ve also had several “conversations with friends” about Normal People. I think that adequate Internet ink has been spilled on Sally Rooney. As many have said before me: what she does obviously appeals. I wish her well.

Apart from Conversations with Friends, one other book remains unread from Joanne’s stack: Sara Baume’s Spill Simmer Father Wither.

When I say unread I mean abandoned. I spent a few days labouring through the first quarter of this book about a man in East Cork who rescues a dog. I can’t quite put my finger on what caused me to abandon this book.

People have different philosophies about their bookshelves. I remember an American friend whose house heaved under the weight of books that she had bought but hadn’t read. I’m the opposite. I can count on one hand the books that I failed to at least trudge through. Unread books in my environment distress me. Looking at Sara Baume’s Spill Simmer Falter Wither unread on my shelves stung me. I set aside everything to read it this winter break.

And I sit here having decided to abandon the book once again.

I thought that the last two years would have helped me appreciate and identify with the main character of Spill Simmer Falter Wither, a man who spends most of his life in isolation. A man who never learned the fine details of his origin story. A man who knows he shares nothing in common with those he sees passing by his window, those who he’s forced to make small talk with every now and again. A man who spent a long time learning the names of the most common flowers in his immediate environment for a lack of anything better to do. A man who spends as much time at home as we all have been forced to during this pandemic. A man who, unlike the rest of us, doesn’t complain.

The novel begins when he rescues a stray dog that carries a lot of emotional baggage. The dog is quick to bite. His new owner is slow to restrain or place a muzzle on him in public space. This leads to inevitable mauling of other dogs. Then the dog warden appears to seize the animal. Fleeing from the warden, the monotony of the everyday is replaced with the monotony of traveling through one grimy Irish village after the other.

I’m sure someone has called the novel life affirming and used several lofty adjectives to describe the bond between man and dog. As the novel progresses, the man falls asleep and in his dreams he enters the psyche of the dog. The man projects everything he has onto this dog. He gives everything he has to give.

I thought that reading this novel in 2019 was the problem. My own life moved at a much more rapid pace. I bounced from one event to the next. I worked my way through pithy, beautiful novels. I returned to this novel with the idea that the pandemic might have put manners on me. Objectively, I cannot fault the construction of this book, the language of this book, the rendering of the character, the empathy Baum has shown him. I recognise the undercurrent of everyday Ireland in these pages. The one thing I’m bereft of is pleasure.

What the novel does best of all is demonstrate that rural Ireland is devoid of public space. The narrator hunts for small gateways where he can neatly tuck his car in before sleeping each evening. Driving through the city centres during the lockdowns of the last two years and seeing the youth of Ireland sitting together on cold concrete, this lack of public space never felt so evident. This is a topic for another day.

Depending on what 2022 has in store for us, I might find myself returning to this book with interest. Stranger things have happened.

You can’t live on love, on love alone

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Swimming in the Dark by Tomasz Jedrowski

In this gentle novel, our narrator Ludwik recalls the summer he met Janusz. The heat of their love was almost strong enough to eclipse the complications of their lives during the final years of Polish communism. The men share a few oneiric days on a lakeside somewhere in eastern Poland. Janusz imagines ghosting the wealthy young woman who has been his meal ticket; Ludwik dreams about freedom. When they return to Warsaw to begin their lives post-graduation, things ultimately fall apart.

While I read Swimming In The Dark, Losing at the Starting Line – Wang Xiuying on Chinese education kept coming to mind, especially the following passage:

The problem as Xi sees it is that the universities produced too many liberals and humanists. Egypt is the worst case scenario: an inflated higher education system with too many humanities graduates leading to endless protests and revolutions. Plenty of talkers, no doers. In April, a report by the People’s Bank of China stated that East Asian countries were falling into the ‘middle-income trap’ because of the preponderance of liberal arts students[…] My humanist friends take solace in the fact that we are not at war: the Japanese Kamikaze Death Squad sent ‘useless’ arts students on suicide missions in the Second World War.

If we pare back this novel’s lakeside moments where love comes close to conquering all and the political backdrop of communism’s terminal years, a disgruntled Arts graduate lies at the heart of the story. The events in Swimming In The Dark take place shortly after the main character, Ludwik, graduates with a Humanities degree, without any real plan and no desire to teach. The existential malaise of an Arts graduate without a strong vocational inclination is not unique to communist societies: having grown up on the opposite end of Europe, in a heavily capitalist society two decades after Ludwig, I faced similar prospects.

On a sentence, paragraph, and scene level, I enjoyed this book. Jedrowski is a skilled writer. However well Jedrowski renders aspects of Polish life and culture, I felt a strong sense that in reading this book, I was eating from the garbage can of ideology.

From early in the story, out on the oneiric lakeside, Ludwik speaks of freedom. The freedom that Ludwik alludes to escaped me as a reader. While the book trots out the scenes of people queuing all day for basic amenities that we all know to associate with the collapse of communism, when Ludwik speaks of freedom, he seems to be speaking about something else. He rejects the idea of becoming a teacher because of the low pay and need to swallow the Party line, but teaching is notoriously underpaid and undervalued in capitalist societies too. He wants to live out and proud as a gay man in the 1980s and seems to allude to communism as the obstacle. In the USA, outside of a few enclaves in a few of the larger cities, homosexuality was just as frowned upon. In many Western liberal democracies, AIDS affected large percentages of the gay communities and their governments left them to die during these years. In Ireland, homosexuality remained illegal up until 1993. The desire of an Arts graduate without any familial connections to live a middle-class and openly queer life in his country’s capital is not unique, easily solved, and certainly not one I would associate with communism. If this book were set in modern day Poland, in which the totalitarianism of communist rule has now been replaced with the totalitarianism of free-market capitalism, a conservative government and the Catholic church, I would find the struggles of Ludwik more real. When Poland joined the European Union, it did so on the promise of capitalist wealth and liberal values, which do not look like they’ve been delivered in equal measures.

We see key characters try to install themselves in the working world. Our narrator makes half-hearted attempts to enroll in a postgraduate programme he has no real interest in. His friend Karolina ends up in some menial position. Ludwik’s lover Janusz is the most successful, getting a job in the office of press control and having no qualms about it. Those who are from wealthier families have better prospects. I have no doubt that this is a relatively accurate portrayal of postgraduate life in communist Poland, but is this different under any other regime? In the US, where Ludwik eventually flees to, would a working class southern youth like Janusz ever manage to enter into a large university in the country’s capital?

The book begins and ends in Ludwik’s self-imposed exile in Chicago, where people ask how are you but don’t care about the answer and the bread is suspiciously soft. Ludwik lives alone, works in an office, and watches Poland collapse from afar. If the character of Ludwik would still live today, he would still be watching Poland fall apart, but without the salacious US media coverage. In the closing pages of the book, we get the sense that life in the US fails to deliver the freedom Ludwik sought. Delusion is the closest thing to freedom Americans can find.

As well as changes in its physical location, Poland has experienced unprecedented shifts in its demographic and political ideology in the last century. Its problems grow more acute with every passing day. While I enjoyed this novel’s tour of Warsaw and quiet acknowledgements of those hidden queers who carried the cultural torch throughout turbulent times, pointing the finger towards communism as the source of all ills strikes a bum note. 32 years after the fall of communism, Poland is not the bastion of LGBT rights you’d imagine.

The question that lingers within me in the days after I finished this book is: if this were a queer love story with a positive framing of the social fabric they enjoyed under communism, could it have been published? Was it so necessary to denounce a failed system for another failed system to feel good about itself?