July 6, 2026
Saudade, by Thomas Trofimuk
As a reader who skipped all the poems in A.S. Byatt’s Persuasion, just say, or who sees a long passage in italics coming in a novel and tends to head for the hills, I might have been taking a chance with Thomas Trofimuk’s sixth novel, Saudade, which is the story of a man whose wife tells him long stories full of digressions as a way to to hide from death. But see, I’d previously had the experience of being absolutely captivated by Trofimuk’s last book, which was narrated by a bridge (you read that correctly), so I had more than a little faith in the author and was willing to follow him wherever the story would take me.
Which is sort of the point of Saudade, actually, about Bruce Flynn, whose anxiety about death is being met by his wife Pilar’s theory that by focusing intently on deeply digressive stories, death won’t be able to find you. And one day while the two are travelling in France, in the middle of one such story, Bruce looks across the table to find that Pilar has disappeared, and thus begins a cross-continent quest to find out where she’s gone, the answer lying deep inside one of her stories inside stories inside stories. And all Bruce has to do is follow the clues, which become curiouser and curiouser, people he encounters on his journey seeming to be people from the story Pilar told, some of the connections uncanny, impossible, and then eventually it becomes clear that Bruce’s journey to find Pilar is actually a different kind of journey, but one no less wrenching, strange, and hard to navigate.
I’ve never read anything else like it. Saudade is unforgettable, a story of longing, grief, love, and marriage, as well as faith and friendship. It’s so weird and so good, and Trofimuk is a storyteller of such consummate skill that the reader is left totally spellbound.
