Prismatic Fiction

There is no such thing, Oscar Wilde believed, as a moral or immoral book. “Books are well written, or badly written,” the Irish critic preferred. Wilde had his 19th-century aesthetic reasons for this standard. If Thomas Trofimuk’s third novel, Waiting for Columbus, were exposed to Wildian measures, a variation on the formula particular to the 21st century, and a once shiny new art form, might emerge: an original book may contain within it a conventional movie and still be worthwhile.

Waiting for Columbus is replete with film tropes and types. A patient in an institute for the mentally ill, unable to cope with reality, adopts an outlandish identity, in this case that of the renowned 15th-century explorer. An attractive nurse with a checkered romantic past falls for his charm and vulnerability. A wise psychiatrist, knowing how important stories are, allows the patient to unfold his elaborate tale. A detective, seeking a missing person, draws closer to the actual truth. He has his demons as well, and an anguished back story.

Don Juan DeMarco and The English Patient are only two of the movies that come readily to mind. Trofimuk’s storytelling is no less cinematic, favouring alternating plot lines and the slow reveal. Even the patient’s personal history is a film conceit: the man who loses everything. If the bereaved male is action-oriented, he executes righteous, bloody revenge upon the wrong doers. If he is sensitive, he often ends up on his back, needing a good woman to coax him onto his feet.

The result of such movie mashing is a story that unfolds with an eerie effortlessness. To be fair, part of the ease of Waiting for Columbus can be sourced to Trofimuk’s sophisticated craft. But part is simply the echoes of plots from similar films. While the book’s mystery element obliges caution in revealing too much, the outcomes for each of the character tropes—the amnesiac, the nurse, the detective— will not disappoint. That is to say, the endings are predictable, and so comforting. They are, in fact, as comforting as the sign-posted themes.

“He cannot distinguish what is real from what he desires to be real,”is one posting. Or this:“The story, Consuela. The story is the thing!” The human spirit, too, is shown to be resilient. No surprise there.

Such are the surfaces of Waiting for Columbus. But below this pleasing, if glib exercise in practical yarn-spinning lies another, more interesting book. Although it may be extreme to declare the subterranean novel at odds with the surface fiction, the tensions are evident throughout and serve to both destabilize the narrative and to lend it stretches of beauty and resonance.

Some of this resonance comes from the equally recognizable literary antecedents being evoked. When Trofimuk references Don Quixote, he means the delusional anti-hero of Miguel de Cervantes 17th-century opus, not Peter O’Toole tilting at windmills. Likewise, underpinning the sensual abandon of the womanizing Christopher Columbus—i.e., the character who exists in the patient’s head—is the Don Juan of Molière or perhaps Byron. It certainly is not Johnny Depp being treated by Marlon Brando.

“I want to breathe the piquant fragrances of a mature woman,” the amnesiac tells the nurse, “to rest my head atop her thighs and breathe her in, make her scent such an essential part of my being that I will never be able to forget. So living without her would be like living without lungs, heart, legs, arms.”

This poetry of bodily seduction is not ornament. As the patient reveals his imaginary existence as the explorer struggling to convince the Spanish court to finance his travels—a tale told with gorgeous, often quirky detail, especially Columbus’s flirtation with Queen Isabella—so his actual story, and the circumstances that have undone him, is brought nearer to resolution.

How Trofimuk narrows the reality-fantasy gap, using the patient’s emerging awareness of sensory connections between the women in his reverie and those of his suppressed past, is daring and remarkable. A scene involving a suicidal swim across the Strait of Gibraltar, for instance, is brilliantly done. As the patient flounders in his body, his mind insists on connections. “Do you remember her eyes?” he asks himself. “Of course you do.” Soon he is summoning smiles and freckles and, perhaps, his waking reality. “It’s a hell of a thing to have daughters. You are surrounded by women. You wish this was your reality, this beautiful dream.”

The swimming scene, half real, half surreal, finds its match in several sequences where time is deliberately collapsed. Isabella of Spain (1451–1504) is surrounded by bodyguards wearing ear buds and brandishing hand guns; in her conversations with “Cristóbal,” as she calls Columbus, the monarch tells him to “get the fuck off my back about these ships” and complains that she has a “Holy Inquisition that’s running amok.” The language is loudly and purposefully wrong.

These “anachronistic artifacts” in Columbus’s story are cause enough for the nurse to wonder if he will ever pull out of the delusion. In actual fact, the patient is viewing present occurrences through the lens of his persona, blurring both. The effect of relaying these scenes in their unstable state is jarring. It is also of a piece with the novel’s closeted obsession with that very blur. Another character observes that he “thinks he remembers having this comfort in his own skin a long time ago.” Columbus himself admits that his journey “will push the edges of knowledge” in search of a western passage to the Orient.

Issues of being comfortable in one’s identity, in a narrative, even in being sure of what is real and what is not, course beneath the calm, calculating veneer of Waiting for Columbus. At times, Thomas Trofimuk is content to allow his prose to push those edges. “Moonrise,” he writes. “Stars pull back. Give the moon room. Perhaps when you are dying, you are able to hallucinate the truth.” Grace notes of longing, of yearning, are frequent, and lovely. So are the questions that compel them.

By design, Waiting for Columbus may wish to be both a standard good read with cinematic satisfactions and a poetic evocation of the sweet instability of most things, including identity. A novelist of considerable talents, Trofimuk may even intend for his book to work differently on different readers. That is a neat trick to pull off. The risk, though, is of producing a book that ends up floundering in mid-ocean, neither shore clearly visible.