In this week’s installation of BwogBooks, Maren Frey reviews The Swimmers, a novel by Julie Otsuka (SOA ‘94)!

When I first saw the cover for Julie Otsuka’s The Swimmers, I was immediately intrigued. I know you should never judge a book by its cover, however, the bright blue luminosity of the pool literally spoke to me. Published in 2022, Julie Otsuka’s third novel tells the story of a group of swimmers at a recreational pool whose routine is upended. 

Otsuka graduated from the School of the Arts with her MFA in fiction in 1994. She has won the Asian American Literary Award and a PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction and been a finalist for the National Book Award, for her novel The Buddha in the Attic. 

The Swimmers follows the same pattern as The Buddha in the Attic as it is narrated by a Greek chorus of the recreational swimmers at the pool. However, the story turns to focus away from the general happenings of the pool when a crack appears in the pool’s concrete floor, leading to the pool’s closure. Zooming in on one of the swimmers, Alice, whose dementia is rapidly advancing, the readers soon learn that she spent her childhood in a Japanese Internment Camp. 

The pool’s closure takes away Alice’s source of comfort and routine, plunging her mind back into a complex web of childhood memories that are plagued by trauma and racism. 

Otsuka delves into one of the common themes of her novels of family by introducing Alice’s estranged daughter who comes home to take care of her deteriorating mother. Their relationship touches on the losses we face without the human connections we all crave. 

In the 192 pages of the novel, Otsuka tells a beautiful story about human connection and the power of memory that invokes a dream-like trance. Immersed in the emotions of the story, you definitely will shed a few tears by the last few chapters. 

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