SHAPIRO: And so did researching this book help you understand your parents in a different way and the world that they had come from? I felt like I couldn't really figure out what to do with my life or how to move on without understanding what came before and what my parents had left behind and also what people had fought for. And I think when I started writing, I really wanted to understand in a more intimate way how life had been back there. I just - I could hardly imagine a society where everything was so scarce and the government was so oppressive. And when I was growing up in Germany - this was mostly in the '90s - my parents' youth in communist Poland seemed like the most exotic thing to me. JEDROWSKI: Because I grew up with my parents' stories of their youth. SHAPIRO: You were born in West Germany to Polish parents, so why did you set this story in communist Poland? But then what happens when it's in a society where you're not necessarily encouraged to become yourself? And I thought that becoming an adult in any society is hard enough.

And that is, which path am I going to take? What sort of person am I going to be, and what compromises will I make?Īnd I really wanted to explore what would happen if the person that you love and that is the center of your world at that moment doesn't share your world view and what happens when things become more and more urgent when you live in an oppressive society where you have to be more and more aware of what you can do because, I mean, freedom is a little bit like air, isn't it? If you don't have much of it, then you have to be very aware of your breathing and of your every move. But beyond that, what I really wanted to go into is how a young person becomes an adult and how he chooses to become himself, how he faces those choices that we all have to make when we transition into adulthood. That's something very powerful that I wanted to explore. I think the love story is very important, the love between two young men and the first time that they really fall in love.

JEDROWSKI: For me, it's essentially a coming-of-age story with a love story attached to it. SHAPIRO: How did you conceive of the central relationship in this book between these two young men? It's the debut novel by Tomasz Jedrowski, who joins us from his home in France. The narrator, Janusz, meets a young man named Ludwik at a summer work camp. The new novel 'Swimming In The Dark' is a teenage love story set in Poland in the 1980s. While protests and the pandemic might make this summer a little different, we can still experience some of those moments through fiction. Summer can be a time to wander in a forest until you get lost, skinny-dip in a lake by moonlight, fall in love.

Swimming in the dark novel