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Hopefully Chris Columbus Won’t Be Directing It | Thomas Trofimuk’s novel Waiting for Columbus could be headed to Hollywood.

WAITING FOR COLUMBUS
By Thomas Trofimuk. McClelland & Stewart. 397 pp. $32.99.

In 2009, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.

Wait a minute — that’s not how the rhyme goes.

But it does in Thomas Trofimuk’s new novel Waiting for Columbus. In it, the local author masterfully explores the ideas of obsession, loss, and love in full cinematic scale. But his Columbus is a patient in a modern Spanish mental institution, trapped inside the head and body of a man full of mysteries. And his Columbus isn’t the nicest guy.

“But then, Columbus himself wasn’t necessarily a good guy,” says Trofimuk. “He pretty much started a genocide in the West Indies, but surely his intention was to create a utopia, rather than the disaster he brought.” Trofimuk’s Columbus is equally fraught with moral turpitude, and the result is a fascinating portrait of man trapped by his own hubris.

But just as fascinating as Trofimuk’s meditations on life, love, and the pursuit of sanity in Waiting for Columbus is his own story of how this book came to be — and the tsunami-sized wave this book has already made in the literary world.

A couple years ago, Trofimuk was a moderately successful writer. An Edmonton native, he worked for the provincial government as a report writer. He published two previous novels, his most recent being dubbed “too quiet” to be interesting to an American market. But he kept writing, his first drafts in longhand with a fountain pen, and soon he had a new behemoth of a novel to send to his Toronto agent.

“I usually let my wife read my work before I send it anywhere, but this time, I hit ‘send’ before she had a chance to read it,” he says. “I was so nervous sending it off, and it was huge — probably 130,000 words. I was pretty sure it wasn’t sellable, but I wanted my agent to read it, to get some feedback on it.”

Well, feedback he got. The kind of feedback every writer wants to hear. “She gave me some ideas, and I tightened a few things up, but pretty much she just sent it off to McClelland & Stewart. Within a few hours, we heard back.”

McClelland & Stewart, one of the biggest publishing houses in Canada, wanted it. Badly. Enough to offer a “pre-emp,” which means they wanted an exclusive deal. They even wanted worldwide rights.

“I couldn’t believe it,” says Trofimuk. “They offered more money than I could imagine.” After a sleepless night, Trofimuk and his agent decided on Canadian rights only, and the American deal went to Doubleday — whose execs also loved it enough to shell out $200,000. And when Doubleday loves something, Hollywood comes calling.

So all of a sudden, the Government of Alberta employee was in Hollywood, talking movie rights and screenplays. And when the advance reader copies were released, more of which were printed than his last two novels combined, the reviews were stellar.

“It’s a bit overwhelming, really,” says Trofimuk, as he’s about to launch his first book tour across Canada. But he’s already hard at work on his next novel. And his Columbus will be blogging for him on his website while he’s gone.

So for this local author, it looks like it’s clear sailing ahead.