A tender and contemplative work of autofiction, Death and the Gardener by Georgi Gospodinov charts the final days of an eminent writer’s beloved father. Seated by the dying man’s bedside, the writer bears witness to both his life and death, recalling his father’s marvellous storytelling, his old-school Bulgarian fathering style, and most of all, the garden he began cultivating after a long-ago cancer diagnosis. A glorious riot of fruit, vegetables and flowers, he’s given it the final years of his life and now the gardener is set to become the garden. In Gospodinov’s first offering since his International Booker Prize winning novel, Time Shelter, we find a poetic and philosophical gift.
Feted and award-winning, the writer’s life is one of travel, literary engagements and a comfortable home life in Sofia. His parents live in a rural village, their days sedate, and for his father, dominated by the huge garden that he first fell in love with seventeen years ago. The cancer that was subdued then has now returned and he won’t live to see his first snowdrops of the new year.
Totally bedridden, the dying man is joined in his ‘horizontal world’ by his literary son, who begins weaving anecdotes and observations into a determinedly non-linear narrative. Although the main character will be dead by the middle of the book, Gospodinov tells us that he will come alive again in the myriad of following stories, each tale used as first aid when the going gets tough for the grieving narrator.
And so we learn about this quick-witted, undemonstrative man, along with a potted history of Bulgarian manhood under the communist rule of the mid to late twentieth century. His father at 7-years-old, a ‘small adult’ beavering away on the family homestead. Later, waiting tentatively in the wings for military service, only to find the army making him an unexpectedly life-changing offer, the decision he eventually makes (or has made for him) a pivotal one.
In his youth, he was, of course, an ultra-cool smoker, part of the generation who learned how to smoke through watching Hollywood movies (narrowed eyes, a choreography of the hands). These men continue to smoke into later life, clinging onto the ‘snorkels of their cigarettes’. They are grafters, drinkers, rebels with a cause, listening to banned radio stations and enjoying their minor rebellions against the Party. When their children are born, they do not know how to vocally express their love for them, a generational muteness ensues.
Understanding but rejecting this learned trait, the narrator summons writers and characters from great literature to help make sense of father-child relationships, sickness and death, the whole overwhelming shebang. Petrarch, Montaigne and Borges light the way, Gospodinov on hand with some beautiful lines.
‘My father was a sort of Atlas, holding the past on his shoulders. Now that he is gone, I can sense that whole past cracking, quietly collapsing in on me, burying me in all its afternoons. The quietly collapsing afternoons of childhood…’
A novel from the heart of one of our finest European writers. Complemented by Angela Rodel’s excellent translation.
If you like this, see also, Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov
Death and the Gardener by Georgi Gospodinov is published by W&N, 224 pages.
