The Swimmers
Julie Otsuka
The Swimmers
Julie Otsuka
From the internationally bestselling author of The Buddha in the Attic comes a novel about memory and loss, mothers and daughters, the stories that make up a life, and what happens when they start to unravel.
"Up there," she says, "I'm just another little old lady. But down here, at the pool, I'm myself."
For the people who swim there each day, the local pool is a haven of unexpected kinship and private solace. For Alice, her daily laps have become the ritual that gives her life meaning, even though she may not remember the combination to her locker or where she put her towel.
But one day, a crack appears deep beneath the surface of the water, and then another, and then another. The pool must close for repairs, and with that Alice is plunged into dislocation and chaos.
Away from the steady routines of her swimming, she is engulfed by difficult memories of her own past. And as her sense of home, and of herself, slip further out of her grasp, her daughter must navigate the newly fractured landscape of their relationship.
Review
Joanna Di Mattia
Julie Otsuka’s third novel, The Swimmers, opens in a strange but spellbinding way, with a cultural anthropology of a California swimming pool and the people who regularly swim in it. We meet them, the swimmers, deep underground, stroking the water at various stages of life and fitness. Some come to the pool to alleviate physical or emotional aches and pains. Others swim out of habit. Some take the fast lane; others can only move slow. All of them, when underwater, leave their real world behind, becoming graceful and agile as they doggedly follow the black line at the bottom of the pool. It’s a singular community, with rules and an etiquette of its own. In this microcosm of America, Otsuka subtly captures the water’s transformative, healing powers – the pool is a near-sacred space populated by emphatically human beings.
Like much of The Swimmers, it’s funny, but also very moving. This opening reads beautifully on its own, and you might well ask: what’s the point of it all? But as Otsuka’s lens narrows it becomes unambiguous where the real story is. A crack appears at the bottom of the pool. One swimmer – Alice, an older Japanese-American woman in the early throes of dementia – emerges to take centre stage. The novel’s experimental mode continues with an inventory of the things Alice can remember and with a chillingly satirical ‘welcome’ to the care facility where she will spend the rest of her days, but the literary flair is always grounded in precise emotions. As Alice’s memories submerge, those of her daughter, a novelist, surface. Through the daughter’s regrets and remorse, the mother comes into focus again.
The Swimmers explores memory, grief and loss with some unbearably good writing – unbearable because it booms with the hurt of experience. Stylistically ambitious, sensitive and mature, The Swimmers never flinches. It’s less than 170 pages but its waters run very deep. This is the first of Otsuka’s novels I’ve read, but it won’t be the last. I’m seriously impressed.
Joanna Di Mattia is a bookseller at Readings Carlton.
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