我覺得它與Call Me By Your Name等同志文學作品給讀者有些類似的感受,也常與相關的作品並列提及(像Cleanness by Garth Greenwell),但同時有著自己傑出的特色,我想喜愛這些作品的人應該也不會對這本失望。
Swimming in the Dark讓我最欣賞的一點是書本的獨特文化背景與頗強烈的政治元素,這兩點不是我大部分讀的書中常見的題材,所以對我而言算是滿新鮮的(也讓我在一開始有點畏懼的XD)。我認為作者將這些背景與書中的角色感情融合的很好,在追尋自己與愛情連結的同時,對自由的嚮往以及抵抗極權的統治也是書中一大重點,在動亂時代的背景下更襯托出兩人之間感情的糾結。
"Because you were right when you said that people can’t always give us what we want from them; that you can’t ask them to love you the way you want."
"Some people, some events make you lose your head. They’re like guillotines, cutting your life in two, the dead and the alive, the before and after."
"This is how I lived back then – through books. I locked myself into their stories, dreamt of their characters at night, pretended to be them. They were my armour against the hard edges of reality. I carried them with me wherever I went, like a talisman in my pocket, thinking of them as almost more real than the people around me, who spoke and lived in denial, destined, I thought, to never do anything worth recounting."
"Selfish. Growing into yourself is nothing but that."
"This wasn’t distraction or entertainment: here was a book that seemed to have been written for me, which lifted me up into its realm and united me with something that seemed to have been there all along and that I seemed to be a part of. It felt as if the words and the thoughts of the narrator – despite their agony, despite their pain – healed some of my agony and my pain, simply by existing."
"No matter what happens in the world, however brutal or dystopian a thing, not all is lost if there are people out there risking themselves to document it. Little sparks cause fires too."