WE DO not talk about death enough: this book is to be welcomed. Death and the Gardener is described as a novel, whose narrator, in 91 very short chapters, describes his father’s dying, his death, and its immediate aftermath.
The father, Dinyo, is about 80 years old, and he faces his end with a beautiful calm; he is a brave man, clearly, but towards the end he experiences great pain, as the various palliative remedies reach their limit. Pain cannot be denied. That has to be faced, like death itself.
The son, who records his father’s dying, is — like Georgi Gospodinov himself, who has spoken about this own father’s death — a world-famous author, winner of numerous prizes, one who spends his life between conferences. But his father’s illness and death interrupts his life, forces him to look inward. Nothing he sees is particularly startling. Death is, in a sense, banal, in that it happens to us all. It is all about him, too. There are other characters: a wife, a mother, a daughter, a brother, but they are not named and remain shadowy. The real subject is himself and how he reacts to the paternal death.
It is a brave choice to write about death. St Augustine did so, describing the death of his mother, St Monica; so did David Rieff (Swimming in a Sea of Death: A son’s memoir, 2008), describing his mother Susan Sontag’s excruciating and ghastly last months. Gospodinov does not approach either for depth of insight, but still, the subject needs airing. The book is translated into occasionally grating American English by Angela Rodel. Readers may note the use of “passing” as a synonym for death, and understand why we really do need to tackle the subject without resorting to euphemism.
Fr Alexander Lucie-Smith is a Roman Catholic priest and moral theologian.
Death and the Gardener
Georgi Gospodinov
Weidenfeld & Nicolson £18.99
978-1-3996-3102-0
Church Times Bookshop £17.09
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