‘My father was a gardener. Now he is a garden’; Georgi Gospodinov’s latest novel is a poignant letter to the self about losing a loved one. Translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel, the International Booker-Prize winning pair have returned with another novel that makes the reader think about the myriad intricacies of the heart.
Children on a street in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, in 1950. (Shutterstock)
A writer has set out to map his father’s journey unto death. His father is dying of cancer and the 56-year-old son is unable to come to terms with this. The father’s garden is left unattended; it blooms with produce and flowers that the father had planted months before his decline. Now the garden survives lonely without its gardener. Out of grief and an urgency to immortalise the man, the writer begins to unfold the life of his father.
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While the story is laden with grief, the book also offers a rich portrait of a man who was a child during the post-war period and lived in Bulgaria when it was a Soviet satellite state. The author brings these historical moments to light without making an undue show of pain or want. The father’s life as a child is written about through a photograph of him wearing ‘hand-me-downs from bigger folks’ as he waits to be old enough to ‘join the family labour force.’ Though American anti-communist propaganda of the time presented the Eastern bloc as full of families living in poverty and sadness, the father believed ideas of rich and poor did not exist then. He believed he had never known sadness because he had never known what it was to be ‘unhappy.’ An expression of sadness over loss, the novel also skillfully brings out broader political nuances and the many historical facets of Bulgarian society.
Death and the Gardener recalls Annie Ernaux’s I Remain in Darkness. The comparison is relevant even at the level of form. Like Ernaux, Gospodinov’s writes fiction which includes many of his own personal details. But any attempt to verify things is futile. So, for instance, we hear of the author travelling to London in May to receive a ‘big prize’ and his father getting frazzled over the press attention the family gets back home in Bulgaria. Gospodinov won the Booker on May 23, 2023 in London. In the same breath, narrator mentions he dedicated the book to his parents. When I look at my copy, I find no dedication and gave up trying to find any simplistic connections.
A chapter begins with: ‘We bury our parents many times over in our imagination. That our parents will one day die is surely one of our earliest fears.’ The child’s helplessness at the diminishment of the parent tears through the reader’s heart. ‘To grow old is to fade, to become transparent,’ Ernaux writes about her mother. Witnessing the ageing of one’s parents, then, becomes an unseemly acceptance of death. Ernaux and Gospodinov both present this idea. We listen to the peripheral voice of a human who once dictated terms, who once filled a place with their resounding presence. What does it mean for this person to be reduced to a fragile being drawing close to an end? It is this end that’s explored in Gospodinov’s writing amid a deafening roar of agony.
Later, the protagonist thinks, ‘Grief is actually egocentric, grief for oneself in an abandoned world.’ This comes at a crucial moment when he is trying to reconcile with the idea of grief. He personalises it and thinks it through like Seneca, Montaigne, WH Auden and William Carlos William have done before him.
The novel plays across time brilliantly with the reader both being present as it is being written and also being led through memories. Solvej Balle’s Booker-shortlisted On The Calculation of Volume I is also recalled while reading of loss in Gospodinov’s novel. Like Balle’s protagonist who wakes up repeatedly and endlessly to the same day without the world changing for her, the author in this book understands the sameness of life when an important figure is removed from his own.
Author Georgi Gospodinov (Courtesy The Booker Prizes)
Birth and death are part of the everyday, and the garden in the novel indicates to the living son the presence of life with a future still attached to it. The garden’s loss is immense without its gardener but its ability to continue to exist is like that of the vintage books in Balle’s novel that outlive their original reader. Neither can exist without their human caregiver, and yet, things in themselves begin to hold a supra-human hold over Time.
Gospodinov’s writing sparkles in Rodel’s careful translation. Not a word seems misplaced; not an emotion wasted; not a sentence unnecessary. This is writing about death with brilliance and strangely, with charm.
Rahul Singh is an academic. He lives in Kolkata.
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