Waiting for Columbus
By: Thomas Trofimuk
Published: August 25, 2009
Format: Hardcover, 408 pages
ISBN: 978-0-7710-8546-8
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
A man, admitted against his will to a modern psychiatric hospital in Spain, insists he is the famous Fifteenth Century explorer Christopher Columbus. His disjointed stories of his loves and obsession with the journey to the West, told to a sympathetic nurse named Consuela, provide tantalizing clues of his life. At the same time, an Interpol agent is also searching for a missing person, who matches the description of the mysterious man who claims to be Columbus. Their lives become entwined as they all search for meaning in the magical and endlessly fascinating novel Waiting for Columbus by Thomas Trofimuk.
The richly textured novel is part allegory and part character study, where events of the past and the present intermingle to create a complex whole. The mysterious man, who calls himself Columbus, is an explorer. Like all people, he is on his life's journey, and that voyage to his self discovery is both literal and symbolic. While seeking and also avoiding his true identity in this world, his rambling stories of the great navigator, form an allegory for a the human journey across the sea of life toward the unknown and undiscovered land of death. The West is the land of the dead in many religious traditions, and also represents the afterlife. The metaphor of the ocean voyage as living one's life permeates the book, and forms a backdrop for the journey to understand oneself.
Thomas Trofimuk (photo left by Randall Edwards) also writes a story about identity. The author formulates the difficult question of who a person really is and if that identity can be created internally, is given by others, or perhaps a combination of the two possibilities. For Columbus, the created identity is real on a deep level, as he is truly an explorer in his own heart. He seeks love and desires to be loved by others, and the ocean also becomes a metaphor for love as a journey of discovery. Nurse Consuela becomes Queen Isabella for Columbus, as she facilitates his voyage by listening to his stories, thereby providing him with symbolic ships, and a reason for the journey toward the unknown.
Not only is the self styled Columbus an explorer, he has already lived part of his adventure stories in the literal world. In his mind, however, he changes the literal details to more romantic tales, in the manner of Don Quixote. Indeed, the symbolic aspects of the patient's often puzzling narratives are an intriguing parallel to the adventures of Don Quixote. Both are seekers of truth and beauty in a world where those qualities are often absent, and for Columbus they exist only within the mind, and in the quest for the promised wonders of the unexplored Western sea. The obsession to discover what lies beyond the limits of this worldly life, drives Columbus to seek knowledge of the possibility of a better and happier life across the symbolic sea.
I highly recommend the powerful and captivating novel Waiting for Columbus by Thomas Trofimuk, to anyone seeking a story of love, hope, and the search for identity. While Columbus may only exist in a literal sense in the patient's mind, the truth is much more complex. Everyone is on life's journey across the vast ocean of this world toward the unknown and unknowable possibilities of the next world. There may be a rich reward or there may be monsters. There may even be an edge of that world of which the ship of life falls off into oblivion. Columbus dares to take that risk, and discovers himself in the process. He, like all people, are waiting for that explorer Columbus within them, to be their guide on the journey of the joys, loves, and sorrows of life's ocean.
Read the unforgettable novel Waiting for Columbus by Thomas Trofimuk, and join the always intriguing, if occasionally frustrating Columbus, as he shares the tales of his voyage with the beguiling Nurse Consuela. Follow their voyages to self discovery, and their search for the undiscovered lands beyond this life and their own mortality, as they wait for the true Columbus within themselves.
