Death and the Gardener
“Death and the Gardener by the Bulgarian author Georgi Gospodinov opens with: ‘My Father was a gardener. Now he is a garden. I don’t know where to begin’.
What follows is a moving, beautiful, and, at times, even humorous, account of the death of the narrator’s father. The book is a novel, but reads very much as an autobiographical account, which is also partly what it is. The father, an avid gardener, and a product (at times a rebellious one) of a strictly socialist Bulgaria, moves to Sofia to stay with his son while receiving treatment for his terminal illness. Throughout the next months, with journeys back in time to the author’s childhood, we sit alongside these two men as they remember, reflect, laugh, cry and help each other through the pain of loss and grief.
With its short chapters, its easy language, its humor (mainly thanks to the father), its light touch on dark subjects, and its historical references to life and politics in Bulgaria, Death and the Gardener delivers so much more than the reader bargained for. It magnifies a small, intimate, experience, creating a highly readable, highly relatable, devastatingly moving story.” - Isabella
A man named Georgi sits patiently by his father’s bedside, until a final winter morning.
Navigating a season of grief, Georgi parses through the endless stories his father used to tell, and the history of his whole generation—boys born in Bulgaria at the end of the World War II, grown into men “often absent—clinging to the snorkel of a cigarette,” swimming in “other waters and clouds.” Out of a barren village yard, Georgi’s father created a special sanctuary: A lush garden where he would live on in the snowdrop sprouts and the first tulips of spring. But without him, Georgi’s past, with all its afternoons, begins to crack.
With striking acuity, Gospodinov explores the quiet rituals of mourning—how we tame sorrow through storytelling and guide a life through to its end. Spanning from ancient Ithaca to present-day Sofia, the novel draws connections between myth and memory, place and emotion. Full of light and unflinching humor, and masterfully translated by Angela Rodel, Death and the Gardener is another profoundly moving work from “one of Europe’s most fascinating and irreplaceable novelists” (Dave Eggers).
