Waiting for Columbus

I won a signed copy of Thomas Trofimuk's novel Waiting for Columbus, and couldn't wait to read it. The reviews at Sophisticated Dorkiness and A Bookworm's World made me anticipate something really good. So I took it along this weekend when it was my turn to chaperone the high school band to a district contest, and read it most of the day, waiting to find out what happens to Columbus while waiting for the band to play their pieces and get judged.

The mystery of the novel is as much about what happened in the past to the character who calls himself Christopher Columbus as about what happens to him in the lunatic asylum he is brought to at the beginning of the novel. The narrative technique consists of weaving facts about the historical Columbus and speculation about his life together with incomplete flashes of memory from the lunatic's life, notes on the story he tells a psychiatric nurse, and the intersecting search of a detective for a missing man. It's quite effective; tempting as it is to believe this lunatic's story, the anachronisms continually remind the reader that something is amiss.

Much of the novel focuses on the psychiatric nurse, Consuela, who at first can't stop "thinking about this patient who wanted her to call a king and queen who've been dead for nearly five hundred years, on a telephone" and who eventually falls in love with Columbus, who charms everyone who meets him. Consuela describes him to her sister as "a chart maker, a stargazer, a navigator, and an amazing storyteller. He is possibly the most romantic man I have ever met."

Part of Columbus' charm is that he believes in an impossible journey into the unknown, literally to find a new world and metaphorically to find his modern identity. Because I work in the ivory tower, I'm familiar with the phenomenon of living and breathing one's interests, even to the extent of getting somewhat lost in them, so the attempt to solve the mystery of his identity didn't make it much of a page-turner for me. My interest was sustained by hints and gradations of truth, as when Columbus is discussing his voyage and says "Some awful thing above me. It waits...This journey is doomed to some catastrophe....So much death and destruction. And the thing is, I come through all right. Death is all around but it does not come for me....I want to defy my fate. I wish to disobey my destiny. I want forgiveness for what I'm about to do."

When Consuela tells "Columbus" that she's learned his real identity, he says "I don't want to hear this story" and she tries to help him distinguish between fiction and reality by saying "life is not a story, Columbus." He replies"Of course life is a story. Life is only a story." It's a seductive idea, as Columbus is a seductive character.

So I enjoyed reading this novel, although perhaps the build-up made me expect something even better. If you read it, I would recommend having a bottle of your favorite wine on hand in case you're like me and reading about people drinking good wine for a few hundred pages makes you want some yourself. I'm longing for white wine, hoping it will be like this description: "the wine bursts with flavor--pear and hints of apple. It is so cold it hurts her teeth."

Some people are especially prone to that, reading Peter Mayle or M.F.K. Fisher or even Julia Powell--we're suggestible when food or drink is mentioned. I'm certainly like that, which is why a friend of mine gave me The Narnia Cookbook some years ago, complete with an inscription that mentions my "appreciation of food in literature." Do you ever feel like this--wanting some of the food or wine or whatever you're reading about?