The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka

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🌀 Book Review: The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka

What the hell did I just read?

⭐️ 1 out of 5 stars
I kept waiting for the “aha!” moment… and instead, I got:

• A mysterious crack in a pool

• Followed by a woman’s slow, sad descent into dementia

• And absolutely zero payoff connecting the two

Literary fiction? Sure. Confusing as hell? Also yes.

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⚠️ Trigger & Content Warnings

This book includes:

• Dementia / cognitive decline

• Death (slow deterioration and grief)

• Elder neglect

• Institutional abuse

• WWII internment (brief reference)

• Grief, loss of parent

• Loss of identity

• Second-person narrative (yep, it's a whole thing)

Please read with caution if any of the above are difficult for you 💔

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🏊‍♂️ What I Thought This Book Was…

Going in, I figured The Swimmers would be about a community of people who swim — how they cope with life, connect with each other, and navigate personal challenges.

And... that’s sort of how it starts.

But halfway through, the book completely shifts gears, and we go from “swimming pool sociology” to a deep-dive into one woman’s tragic decline due to dementia.

No warning. No clear bridge. No thematic snap-back to tie the two halves together.

Just: CRACK. SHIFT. SADNESS. ✌️

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🧠 Plot Summary — Spoilers Ahead!

📌 This is the FULL SPOILER version. You’ve been warned.

PART 1: The Underground Pool

We meet a large, quirky, unidentified group of swimmers, narrated in the first-person plural (“we”). They’re obsessed with their pool. Swimming is everything. It’s ritual. It’s identity. It’s therapy.

They swim to escape grief, anxiety, parenting, aging, capitalism.
It’s oddly poetic and a little repetitive but strangely soothing.

PART 2: The Crack

A crack appears in the pool floor. That’s it. Just a crack. No explanation. No origin.

The swimmers lose their minds (emotionally, not literally... yet).
They speculate, argue, panic. Theories are tossed around like chlorine tablets.
Eventually, the pool shuts down. Everyone is devastated.

Then...

PART 3: Diem Perdidi (I Have Lost the Day)

Suddenly, we’re with Alice, one of the swimmers, but now the focus is solely on her dementia and how her daughter narrates her decline.

Point of view shifts to second person (“you”), directed at Alice.
It’s disorienting (intentionally), and brutally heartbreaking.

Memories come and go — a past internment camp, a daughter who died, a first love who wasn’t “the one,” a distant husband.
She forgets names. Faces. Her daughter.

The pool? Barely mentioned again.

PART 4: Belavista

Alice is moved into a for-profit memory care facility, Belavista, which “welcomes” her with a cold, impersonal breakdown of her future:

• You will lose your independence.

• You will forget your name.

• You will die here.

Yikes. It’s all told in second person, and it is DARK. The institution pretends to be caring, but it's clearly sterile, greedy, and grim.

PART 5: Euroneuro

Alice deteriorates completely. She stops speaking. Eventually, she dies.
Her brain is studied posthumously at a neurology conference in Paris.
Her husband finally moves on. Her daughter... still processing.

And that’s it.

The crack never comes back.
The pool doesn’t matter anymore.
The swimmers? Vanished. Gone.

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🤷 Final Thoughts: So… What Was the Point?

This book felt like two totally different novels stapled together:

• Part 1–2: Surreal commentary on community, habit, and loss of shared space

• Part 3–5: Intimate, painful portrayal of memory loss and familial grief

Are they metaphorically connected? Maybe.
Did I feel like they were connected while reading? Absolutely not.

I kept waiting for the pool to come back, or for the “crack” to somehow mirror Alice’s mental decline, or for the group of swimmers to show up at her funeral. Anything.

But... nope. Just vibes. Sad, slow, fragmented vibes.

And listen — I get it. This is literary fiction. It’s supposed to be experimental and disjointed and tragic. But for me? It was unsatisfying, confusing, and emotionally lopsided.

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⭐ My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

The swimming metaphor broke before the pool did,
and I was left floating in sadness without a lifeline.

If you love poetic, nonlinear literary fiction with experimental voice and a gut-punch ending — this might work for you.

But if you like clear structure, resolution, and consistency?
You might find yourself asking, like I did:

“What the hell did I just read?”

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🛒 Want to judge it for yourself?

👉 Buy The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka on Amazon (affiliate link — if you’re brave enough to dive in)

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🏊‍♀️ If You Liked This (or Wanted More From It), Try:

• The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka – More poetic, but better structured

• The Collected Schizophrenias by Esmé Weijun Wang – Deep dive into identity and mental health

• The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa – Surreal exploration of forgetting

• The Caretaker by Ron Rash – For a more grounded take on caretaking and loss