by Thomas Trofimuk
NEWEST PRESS
2026/$23.95/392 pp.
Edmontonian Thomas Trofimuk’s sixth novel, Saudade (Portuguese for a nostalgic longing for someone absent), opens with middle-aged Bruce’s obsessive fear of death. This fear is so pronounced he can’t enjoy life. In a bid to ease Bruce’s anxiety, his wife Pilar has been telling him ever-more-complex stories with myriad digressions and characters. As Bruce summarizes it, Pilar has “a theory about telling a story so complex and convoluted that you could vanish inside it—and even hide from Death, stop time. She was telling me stories to help me cope with my fear of death.”
While the couple is on holiday in France, Pilar is deep into such a story. Bruce is transfixed, absent gaze directed at the café table, and when he looks up, Pilar has vanished.
She doesn’t reappear. No one at their hotel has seen her, and calls to her phone go to voicemail. Bruce puts off going to the police, convinced that Pilar’s disappearance is intended to provoke him to embark on an extravagant errand of retrieval. What ensues is Bruce combing back through the stories and characters Pilar reeled out to him, in a bid to find her. This takes him—variously—to Lyon, Palm Springs, Seattle, Lake Louise, Madeira and Sanremo.
Not easily classified, Saudade’s plot amounts to a caper, albeit a mirthless one. Bruce doggedly flies around the globe, increasingly wearied by Pilar’s disappearance and trail of characters. He is often bewilderingly passive and easily distracted once he reaches the locales where her clues take him. The book’s plot demands colossal suspension of disbelief, and yet it niggled at me that there was never a mention of Bruce’s shirked professional duties (he owns a landscaping company) or profligate travel budget as he spends unanticipated weeks flying around the globe and staying in expensive accommodation. I found myself internally scolding him as he idles his days away like a tourist rather than remaining on task to locate the missing wife who is ostensibly the object of his quest.
I found the occasional lazy writing, errors in French dialogue and use of clichés distracting. For instance, when Bruce meets a woman in a bar, he muses that she “has the illusion of sexiness that is the purview of French women,” but what this concretely looks like is not spelled out.
Saudade offers a grand and imaginative premise. Pilar’s initial elaborate story is consuming and rich with detail, and pleasing momentum and energy builds early on as Bruce lurches from one odd scenario to the next in his hunt to find her. And throughout, deftly planted clues foreshadow without spoiling the eventual resolution to the mystery.
Jane Kubke is a writer in Calgary.
