Views from the Page and the Oven: Waiting for Columbus

There are days when she wishes she could be blunt, or even violent.  She’d like to shake him-get the remaining stories to fall onto the ground.  Then they could stand around and look at the bones of his stories, all haphazard and abstruse on the pebbles.  In the clear light of day, they could perhaps make sense of these bones, put them in order, find the end, and more important, find the beginning before the beginning.

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Getting towards the end of books read in 2011 here, just these last three to go. In Waiting for Columbus Thomas Trofimuk presents us with an insane asylum with a new patient. A man is brought to this asylum in contemporary Spain insisting that he is Christopher Columbus. Through the stories he tells Nurse Consuela the reader is brought into the mind of this patient, a mind that has been so severely traumatized that histories fuse together.

Trofimuk does a great job of keeping the reader engaged in the story. This in no way is a straight telling of the Columbus we know from our history lessons. Trofimuk shows the many sides and complexities of the man, while weaving in enough anachronisms into the 15th century story to keep the reader wondering what exactly is going on (Columbus  has a phone what?), as this is no ordinary tale. It is not until the very last pages, when Columbus the patient has finally told years worth of tales of his life, that the reader finally understands exactly what happened.

This is a fairly long book, so it is a lot to ask of readers to be kept in the dark for so long, wondering if the pay off will all be worth it in the end, but the prose are strong and the story engrossing enough, that if you enjoy books that are as much about the journey as anything else, Waiting for Columbus should be right up your ally. Because of the style, the vast majority of the book feels like walking in unfamiliar territory in a really bad fog, one that you can’t even see your hand in front of your face it’s so bad. Which way is up? We have no idea, but that’s the point, and gives more bang for your buck if you stick with it through the end. This book is so much more than I’ve been able to describe here, it’s mystery, intrigue, romance, a puzzle in which the reader is just along for the ride.