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THE NIGHT SWIMMERS
By: Peter Rock
Soho Press
March 2019
On Sale: March 12, 2019
272 pages
ISBN: 1641290005
EAN: 9781641290005
Kindle: B07D6B1BXY
Hardcover / e-Book
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Fiction
βSwimming at night, to compare its slipperiness to that of a dream would be to ignore the work of staying afloat, the mesmerism brought on by the rhythm, the repetition of the strokes.β Beneath the surface of Lake Michigan there are vast systems: crosscutting currents, sudden drop-offs, depths of absolute darkness, shipwrecked bodies, hidden places. Peter Rockβs stunning autobiographical novel begins in the β90s on the Door Peninsula of Wisconsin. The narrator, a recent college graduate, and a young widow, Mrs. Abel, swim together at night, making their way across miles of open water, navigating the currents and swells and carried by the rise and fall of the lake. The nature of these night swims, and of his relationship to Mrs. Abel, becomes increasingly mysterious to the narrator as the summer passes, until the night that Mrs. Abel disappears. Twenty years later, the narratorβnow married with two daughtersβtries to understand those months, his forgotten obsessions and dreams. Digging into old notebooks and letters, as well as clippings heβs preserved on the βpsychic photographyβ of Ted Serios and scribbled quotations from Rilke and Chekhov, the narrator rebuilds a world heβs lost. He also looks for clues to the fate of Mrs. Abel, and begins once again to swim distances in dark water.
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