DEATH AND THE GARDENER, by Georgi Gospodinov; translated by Angela Rodel
It’s not easy being grieved, to paraphrase Kermit the Frog. Writers, in particular, will just not let you rest in peace.
The Bulgarian author Georgi Gospodinov’s new novel, “Death and the Gardener,” gloomily shadows a father’s rapid, painful decline and demise at 79 after he is diagnosed with cancer for the second time — adult diapers, translated here as “nappies,” and all.
The unnamed narrator-son is an award-winning novelist with a strong resemblance to Gospodinov, who won the International Booker Prize in 2020 for “Time Shelter” and whose father also died of cancer in his 70s.
Permit this reader a moment of extreme autofiction fatigue: a longing for clearer genre guardrails. A little border edging.
“Time Shelter” was a complex satire about politics and nostalgia, with the ingenious idea of memory care clinics that replicated previous eras catching on in broader society. “Death and the Gardener” is shorter, simpler, epigrammatic and intimate. Like Geraldine Brooks’s mourn-moir “Memorial Days,” from earlier this year, its 200-odd pages have a stop-and-start quality.
But then haltedness is one of grief’s major hallmarks. “It was as if some heavy slab of stone was pressing down on my chest,” is how a friend of the narrator’s describes the feeling, arriving unexpectedly after a month of numbness, and remaining for a year. Leafing through Montaigne’s essay “On Sorrow,” the narrator notes that the mythical figure Niobe, mourning the seven sons and seven daughters killed by wrathful gods, turned to actual stone.
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