December 5, 2022

The Elephant on Karluv Bridge, by Thomas Trofimuk

“The elephant came, as I predicted, Really, in the span of more than six hundred years, an elephant was inevitable.”

A novel about an elephant escaped from the Prague Zoo, narrated by centuries-old bridge?

I wanted to read it, and purchased a copy in the summer that I’ve now scrambled to fit into my 2022 reads, and I’m so glad I did, because I loved it. Thoughtful, artful, playful (a note on an opening page reads, “Any resemblance to actual elephants, living or dead, is entirely deliberate), Thomas Trofimuk’s latest novel, The Elephant on Karluv Bridge, is an absorbing literary puzzle and truly a delight to encounter.

Sál, the elephant, escapes from the zoo, and The Bridge saw it coming, but of course, The Bridge has seen a lot already in six centuries. Everyone else on the streets of Prague, however, is caught unaware, including the zoo’s night watchman whose psychologist wife has decided she wants to have a baby, and an American recovering-alcoholic whose isolated life attending a lighthouse on a Scottish island is interrupted by her father taking ill in Prague and necessity that she rush to his bedside, her taxi colliding with a street performer with whom she finds immediate connection; an aging ballerina haunted by the ghostly presence of Anna Pavlova; the conductor whose choir is due to perform early morning on the bridge from which Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart peed into the river in April 1792, and whose lead soprano is keeping a secret; and a bodyguard with PTSD. All of these lives intersecting in ways that are both remarkable and otherwise, these intersections woven with the story of the elephant herself who carries memories of her early life in Zambia and the moments that brought her across continents and into captivity.