reviewed
"Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood."
--Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Elephant on Karluv Bridge. Set in Prague and narrated with great panache by the 600-year-old Charles Bridge, this novel begins with an elephant named Sál escaping the Prague Zoo. As the elephant moves through the beautiful Czech city, the lives of the men and women she meets are altered by the encounter. Each character is at a crossroads, and desperately seeking the wisdom they need to wrestle with profound questions—how to live, how to love, who to love, how to heal. And the elephant herself is haunted, as mem¬ories of her long-ago capture in Africa resurface.
Sál carries the narrative from one point of view to another: Vasha, a writer and night watchman at the zoo, and his wife Marta, a psychotherapist, confront the question of whether to have a child; Šárka, Marta’s patient and a dancer at the end of her career, is visited by a charming and often abrasive manifestation of the long-dead ballerina Anna Pavlova; Joseph, a clown and bouffon, performs on the Karlův Bridge itself, and he is about to be struck down (literally and figuratively) by a new love…
Through it all, Sál steals the show, wandering the streets in search of water and food, bearing her own share of sadness and painful memories as she struggles to find her way out of her bewildering predicament. Though she, like the humans she encounters, is free now to make her own choices, she is also displaced and lost.
Thomas Trofimuk’s novel masterfully convinces us to accept all the wonders contained in it: that a bridge can tell a story, that art is integral to our survival, that an elephant can scatter sudden flashes of insight in her wake, that there is no separation between the grief of elephants and the grief of humans.
Doubting Yourself to the Bone is a story about the nature of grief, about what it means to be a parent in the face of great sorrow, the idea of re-invented love and hope. Set in Paris and a small town in the Canadian Rockies, the novel is propelled forward by a horrific car crash that reverberates for the victim’s husband and daughters. From a scotch-swilling Tibetan monk to a titillating, imagined waif named Katya, whose uninvited visits are always intriguing, this story serpentines through the labyrinth of grief and pain as the victim’s husband wrestles with the question, was the car crash an accident or intentional? It is a bumpy and strange journey, peopled with a capricious mother, an aging alcoholic uncle, five Buddhist monks in a broken van, and a nudist lesbian, that leads its main character and the reader on the road to salvation.
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“It has been a long time since a book had me as thoroughly engaged as Thomas Trofimuk’s Doubting Yourself to the Bone. The Edmonton author’s writing is poetically wonderful from beginning to end as he drapes his words over a story that deals with death but is really about life and can’t help but leave you thinking … this novel flows together seamlessly.”
-- Edmonton Journal
Three lives, one unreliable narrator and the consequences of losing intimacy. This is All a Lie opens with Ray leaving his mistress for the final time. At the bottom of her apartment tower, he answers his phone. It’s Nancy, his lover, and she is threatening to jump if he drives away. She wants emotional truth in an arena where everything is a lie. She wants a reason to stay alive and Ray is uniquely unqualified to give her what she wants.
Ray’s wife, Tulah, loves snow and keeps a snow journal – every time it snows she goes out in it and records what she thinks and feels about the snow in the context of her life. Tulah is filled with secrets, and denial, and unhappiness and when she is drawn into Ray’s messy affair, everything she thought she knew is thrown aside. What are the consequences of losing intimacy? Does Nancy jump from her 39th floor balcony? What happens with Tulah and Ray? The answers lie within, perhaps.
The 52nd Poem. After an illicit affair, a man decides to send a poem a week to his former lover, even as he begins a new relationship. As the man's love affair progresses, the poems to his old lover continue until finally, he must send the last poem. But will he? Who will win the battle for his heart, the woman of the past or the woman of the present?Using unconventional second person narrative, Trofimuk envelopes his reader with an intense sense of intimacy, drawing the reader into the story as one of the main characters. The result is a remarkably honest, almost brutal, look at the pain of letting go.
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Winner of the 2003 Alberta Book Awards Georges Bugnet Novel of the Year, the City of Edmonton Book Prize and the Manuela Dias Book Design of the Year Award.
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"Almost every word he records resonates with beauty, truth and tenderness." —— Winnipeg Free Press
"The 52nd Poem is a Can Lit classica gripping, powerful and moving book" —— Edmonton Journal "The best book I’ve read all year!"
Highly acclaimed Canadian novelist Thomas Trofimuk bursts onto the international literary stage with this dazzling novel, rich with all the emotional intensity of The English Patient.
In a Spanish mental institution in 2004, a man who believes he is Christopher Columbus begins to tell his story. Nurse Consuela listens, hoping to discover what tragedy drove this educated, cultured man to retreat from reality. This Columbus is not heroic: he falls in love with every woman he meets, and, on land, he has absolutely no sense of direction. More troublingly, he is convinced a terrible tragedy is coming. Yet with each tale, Consuela draws closer to this lost navigator.
Waiting for Columbus is richly imagined, cinematic, and often playful; a novel about truth, loss, love, and hope by a writer at the height of his powers.
