Death and the gardener of Georgi Gospodinov Review – what it feels like to lose a father | fiction

TThe Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov was published in the Anglophone world for years before using Time Shelter to win the International Booker Prize 2023 through an Alzheimer's clinic that builds the past so successfully, and amazes the broad world.

He may now be Bulgaria's biggest export. His new novel Death and the gardener are always playful, never linear, and the gardener consists of vignettes of a loved one dying and dead father, who was told by a narrator who, like Gospodinov, is an author. Gospodinov has recently spoken publicly about losing his own father, and the novel feels autobiographically in the tone. When we read: “My father was a gardener. Now he is a garden”, it is not the beginning of a surrealistic relapse, but more direct research on how we express and where we set our love.

It is more difficult to write about fathers than about mothers, says the narrator. “The father is a different kind of presence – shadowy, mysterious, sometimes frightening, often absent, clutching on the snorkel of a cigarette, he swims in other waters and clouds.” The book tries a means of catching a gentle man whose passion is his garden, and the grief of losing him. Odysseus and the biblical Joseph are used as examples of difficult fathers, but not as such without a heart. The novel refers to the episode in Homers Odyssey, in which Odysseus observes his old father Laertes to his garden after years, and in a sense, this book is an extension of this specific scene.

Death and the gardener are also a rejection of the toxic patriarchal culture, which bloomed according to communist rule. The narrator remembers the story that someone told him about a classmate, who, when asked by a teacher, responds in which his father works, replies “The Slap Factory”, one of the sad and funny anecdotes of the book. Officials of the Communist Party destroy the too tight trousers of the narrator's father and let him cut himself and the “Beatles-like” hair of his young sons. The father's life is of poverty and lost dreams, but he “managed to transform every place into a garden, every house into a home”.

When the father is old and sick, the narrator develops a love of hate to his garden. He loves the “humming zen of the bees”, its beauty, the way it is a declaration of love in a culture in which “it is not common to say things like to say how I love you”, But he also believes that “there was a fatal connection, a Faustian between them. I imagined that it slowly slid away his strength and fed the fruits and roses in her, the Rosier grew the cherries, tulips and tomatoes, he became the pale.”

We sit in the hospital with the narrator and on his father's deathbed. Overwhelmed by the medical language – “suspected spread in the cerebrospinal canal” – he ponderes that “I had now known that Latin was a dead language. Now I know that it is the language of death.”

The novel not only describes Bulgarian burial traditions (eat cooked wheat from someone's grave and you will dream of it) and also captures how the technology has changed our relationship to death. “After death, the phone is a source of metaphysical horror.” A few days after his father's funeral rings the late man's cell phone. A voice on the line says: “Hey Dinyo, I hope you don't sleep …” We are told by a woman who buries her dead husband with his phone just to rings her a few days later. “I was afraid, then I decided to call him back and he didn't answer.” The narrator also accidentally calls his father before he remembers.

There are some clichés, and the narrator's luxurious jetsett becomes annoying, but the occasional slip is easily forgiven in such a warm and melancholic writer – the way that also notes: “I wonder whether flowers are not hidden assistants for the dead who are among them and watch the world through the periscopy of their tribes.” The book is endlessly quoted, and the narrator's travel bragging is inserted into a sensitive context by the lack of travel, which is made possible by the Bulgarian under the Soviet regime. He tells us about his father's only trip abroad to Finland, a reward of his agricultural collective for good work. The amount that Bulgarians may issue there is limited by the Communist Party. Another man on the trip smuggles extra money and hides it in hand -rolled cigarettes. In a attack of excitement that he can finally travel, he accidentally smokes it.