My father was a gardener. Now he is a garden.
A man sits by his father’s bedside and reports radically and gently until a final winter morning.
His father was one of that generation of tragic smokers born right after the World War II in Bulgaria, who clung to the snorkels of their cigarettes. A rebel without a cause, he knew how to fail with heroic self-deprecation.
The garden he created out of a barren village yard first saved him, then killed him It remains his living legacy: peonies and potatoes, roses and cherry trees – and endless stories.
But without him, his son’s past, with all its afternoons, began to quietly crack. Because the end of our fathers is the end of a world.
From the winner of the International Booker Prize, comes a novel about a father, a son, and an orphaned garden in a fading world that spans from ancient Ithaca to present-day Sofia, interweaving the botany of sorrow, the consolations of storytelling and the arrival of the first tulips of spring.
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Reviews
Profoundly moving . . . more a celebration of life than a chronicle of sorrow . . . Like Seamus Heaney, Mr. Gospodinov digs with his pen. What sprouts up is a portrait of devotion, love and respect, of time passing and roles reversing
A lesson about death conveyed with the striking simplicity of the heart's guidance
Moving, raw and elegant. A book that will grow in you for years to come
With his poetic verve and melancholic irony, Georgi Gospodinov is one of the most original voices in European literature . . . Death and the Gardener, is a memoir, confession and snapshot in one - and his most personal novel to date
A beautiful testimony of a loving son towards his father, who is vividly depicted as a tall, good-humoured gardener, full of stories and exaggerations . . . With gentle wit, insight and love, Georgi Gospodinov has written a tender filial tribute with universal resonances
An exquisitely tender novel . . . Death and the Gardener is pleasurably absurdist yet elegiac
This light, slight, melancholic little book is concerned with the transformation of one thing into another: a father's life into the stories that can never replace him
Gospodinov is a writer of great warmth as well as skill . . . He can draw out fully dimensional characters from the broken details of their fractured memories
All Gospodinov's work is time-bound and time-free, haunted by time and fleeing from it . . . This is inevitably a sad book in places, yet it is lit with remembered warmth, happiness, laughter, and a kind of lightness characteristic of its writer
A profound and surprising reflection on the death of his father
Georgi Gospodinov is one of the most interesting and innovative writers of this century
Gospodinov's books stand somewhere between metafiction, autofiction, essay and thought experiment
The simplicity and depth of this crystal clear prose fill me with great admiration
Gospodinov gives a lucid account of his father's last days and his own lasting grief, enlivened with memories and anecdotes from decades past . . . A moving exploration of "the botany of sorrow"
Georgi Gospodinov, the magnificent Bulgarian writer, has long managed to write great stories contemplating the world from a micro-perspective . . . Now through a garden, which is a kind of biography of the father
A wonderful elegy for his father, on par with the one Mallarmé dedicated to his son
One of the most beautiful books ever published about the death of a loved one
Gospodinov writes with a glorious lack of restraint, the prose taking on a poetic quality in places . . . Unruly, uncommon and quite magically alive
Elegies are the genre of our time. In Death and the Gardener, Georgi Gospodinov has written a powerfully moving elegy for his father that is, at the same time, an assertion of the writer's privilege to have the last word
To the select canon of worthwhile books about fathers, Gospodinov has created a vital and valuable addition
A tender, lyrical meditation on a father's death and a son's grief
Tender, funny, unforgettable. A book so full of love for its place and people. One for all of us who've lost the elder who tended the land and stories we grew up on
Epigrammatic and intimate . . . A consolation rather than a provocation, and occasionally darkly funny . . . It might have you mulling your own pithy epitaph