Forty years ago, when my father was dying, I had an idea that I half believed would prolong his life. Whenever he had a medical test or procedure, my husband and I painted the walls of one of the rooms in our house, telling ourselves that this ritual would somehow guarantee good news. For a while, our plan seemed to be succeeding. But it stopped working long before we ran out of rooms to paint.
Mercifully, I’d forgotten much about that time, including the reason the narrow passageway outside my study is such an odd salmon pink. But the Bulgarian poet and novelist Georgi Gospodinov’s Death and the Gardener—a tender, lyrical meditation on a father’s death and a son’s grief—brought those memories back. Gospodinov’s narrator writes the words “Please let my father not be in too much pain” in his notebook seven times, “like an amulet—that number should help.” He accepts an invitation to his father’s favorite country, Finland, because going there, he tells himself, might cure his desperately ill parent. When, at the end of his trip, he shatters his ankle with “one careless step,” he wonders, “Who knows, perhaps this is the price I need to pay for my father to be given a little more life.” Early in the spring, he looks for an omen among the old women selling flowers at bus stops: “If there are snowdrops, I tell myself, then my father has a chance. There aren’t any.” These thoughts are reminiscent of Joan Didion’s memoir The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), in which she describes her hope that attending a church service or simply being alone might turn time back to the moment before her husband’s sudden death.
Though an introductory note to Death and the Gardener explains that this is a novel in which characters and events drawn from real life have been fictionalized, I kept thinking that it was a memoir, and not only because the son’s biography—he is a celebrated writer who lives in Sofia and travels to international book and film festivals—mirrors the author’s. The “big prize” for which he goes to London sounds much like the International Booker Prize, which Gospodinov and his translator, Angela Rodel, won in 2023 for Time Shelter, an imaginative novel about a clinic that treats Alzheimer’s patients by recreating earlier historical periods.
Like Time Shelter, Death and the Gardener is concerned with memory and our longing to hold on to the past. But its intensity and the rawness of the experience it depicts make it hard to believe that any of this was invented. In any case, Gospodinov has philosophical and literary reasons for wanting this work to resist categorization:
This book has no obvious genre; it needs to create one for itself. Just as death has no genre. Nor does life. And the garden? Perhaps it’s a genre unto itself, or it gathers all others into itself. An elegiac novel, a novel/memoir, or a novel/garden. It makes no difference to the botany of sorrow.
The first of the ninety-one numbered sections into which Death and the Gardener is divided begins with two sentences that echo throughout the book, accruing a deeper meaning each time: “My father was a gardener. Now he’s a garden.”
Gardening was the father’s passion. He kept meticulous records of what he planted and harvested. He knew precisely how many snowdrops were blooming in his yard. Whenever the family moved from one apartment to another,
he would carefully dig up the hyacinth, narcissus and toadflax bulbs, the peonies and tulips—his favourite dark-blue tulips from Holland—which he refused to part with and would replant in the garden at each new place. I wonder whether flowers aren’t covert assistants to the dead who lie beneath them, observing the world through the periscope of their stems.
In the space between “My father was a gardener” and “Now he’s a garden,” the tense changes from past to present, and there’s a parallel shift from simple fact to metaphor. The ways in which the father lives on in his garden—in which he has become his garden—are at the heart of the narrative: “Though the gardener is mortal, the garden is immortal.” With its emphasis on the transformative aspects of death, the novel reminded me of the passage about a drowned father in Shakespeare’s The Tempest: “Nothing of him that doth fade/But doth suffer a sea change/Into something rich and strange.” In Ariel’s song, the father turns into pearls and coral, while in Gospodinov’s book the parent’s spirit survives in the form of a cherry tree and a tomato plant.
After the father’s funeral, in December, the son contemplates the barren earth and imagines the return of spring, when
the bees would float about heavily, drunk on everything, in their buzzing Zen. My father, the gardener, would appear, invisible behind some bush, to mutter something under his breath, to smell the roses, to get rid of some unneeded branch.
The son wonders whether he should tell the family dog and the roses that the gardener won’t return.
The opening section ends with another statement that will recur: “Nothing to fear.” It’s the father talking now, offering the terse, confident reassurance that defines his stoic and kindly nature. These three words—his favorite phrase—are his answer to every inquiry about his health, his worsening weakness, his weight loss, his doctors’ refusal to offer him comforting lies. It’s how the father responds when the son remembers that the beloved Bulgarian writer Chudomir jumped out of his hospital window to escape the torments of his final illness. And it’s what he said when the family went camping in an area known for bear sightings and he spent the night outside the tent, guarding his sleeping loved ones with his wife’s serrated bread knife.
Knowing how little time he has left, the father has everything to fear, yet he seems admirably intrepid, certainly compared with his son, who recalls being an anxious child, obsessed with the prospect of his parents’ deaths and the fantasy that he was adopted. Now he is terrified that his father will suffer—and afraid of what it will be like to live without him. He finds solace in conversations with his wise and loving daughter and in reading Seneca and Montaigne. But these consolations are no match for the devastation of his father’s decline. When the old man can no longer walk the short distance from his bed to the bathroom, the son thinks, “You could’ve taken the man without humiliating him.” An entire chapter is devoted to the last time the father climbs the four flights to his son’s apartment.
On the first page is a passage in which Gospodinov warns us that he has no intention of prettifying death or looking away from a tragic and humbling deterioration. After a three-hundred-kilometer drive from his rural village to Sofia, the father—thin, hunched, having lain down in the backseat the entire way to dull the pain—stands in the son’s doorway. “I wet myself,” he says, “guilty like a child, apologetic and with that characteristic self-irony of his, I’ve become a laughing stock in my old age.” When the narrator’s brother calls to say that the father’s bedroom is being made wheelchair accessible since he may yet live another year, “He’s already in nappies, I cut in quietly, he can’t get up. I think this was the moment my brother realised how far-gone things were.”
The British usages—nappies instead of diapers and realised for realized—suggest that we are reading the UK edition of the book. For American readers, these are the only slight stutters in Rodel’s otherwise smooth and sensitive translation, which conveys the warmth, sincerity, and irony of the writer’s voice and rises to the challenges that must have been posed by the nuances of Gospodinov’s language and his fondness for wordplay. “My father died and My father is dying are two completely different sentences,” he writes.
The first is a fact, a conclusion, the second is a novel. A long story with twists and turns of hope and despair….
Death is also a linguistic problem. The word “dies” is short and punchy. The thudding “d” hammers in the final nail, leaving no hope.
What complicates and partly alleviates the narrator’s anxiety is the feeling that he has already lived through his father’s dying—or anyway his near death during a previous bout with cancer. The doctors’ predictions were dire, yet he survived another seventeen years without giving up smoking. After that first diagnosis, father and son sat on a bench in Sofia’s botanical garden to have “one of those conversations you never have under any other circumstances”:
Suddenly the person next to you, whom you consider invariably present, starts gleaming in his mortality, becomes translucent and fragile. The thread of his life brightens like cobwebs, which suddenly become visible in the autumn sun.
That time, the parents had traveled from their village to the Bulgarian capital not only for medical tests but also to see their son’s newborn baby. Gazing at their tiny granddaughter from the threshold of the nursery, “they wanted to kiss the baby’s hand,” the narrator observes.
In a patriarchal culture like Bulgaria’s…the young kiss their elders’ hands, the young bow and show respect. But now look how the Nativity turns everything upside down. They took timid steps forward, with such reverence, as if bowing before a person who had come from another world.
The father says that he wants to live longer mostly so that his granddaughter will remember him, and he gets his wish.
The book, Gospodinov tells us, is not only about the father’s death but also about his life. Luckily for writer and reader, the father was a gifted storyteller. In the hospital, he recites his medical history with so much verve and drama that he attracts an attentive audience of doctors and nurses. We hear the father’s favorite jokes and anecdotes, his accounts of personal milestones, turning scattered fragments of biography into a lively ongoing monologue. We learn not only what happened to him but also how he saw his life through the stories he thought worth telling.
The father grew up in a small Bulgarian town in which every family could trace its history back for generations. He attended a technical college, though neither parent seemed particularly eager to help him get an education. Too poor to replace a broken school cap, he made a new visor with the blackened cardboard from his chemistry textbook and was scolded by his professor instead of praised for his ingenuity. After seeing a film about the Harlem Globetrotters, he became a devoted basketball fan. He played in college and traveled the country with the Bulgarian army team but was forced by his family to turn down an offer to join the regional capital’s professional team. Unemployed during the economic downturn that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall, he tried to establish himself in a succession of businesses: he grew huge quantities of onions after a nationwide shortage that ended before his produce reached the market; he attempted to raise ducks and silkworms, keep beehives, and start a pig farm and an agricultural collective.
Several of the father’s stories describe life in an Eastern Bloc country in which one could despise the regime but, with luck, avoid what he and his friends called being taken “in a Jeep to the labour camp.” A doctor’s note from a dentist friend enabled him to “weasel out” of the mandatory annual parades commemorating the Red Army’s 1944 entrance into Sofia. He’d sit on his balcony, roasting peppers in a pepper roaster, “that wondrous culinary invention of Bulgarian socialism,” and waving to the dressed-up crowds “with their half-wilted carnations and tattered paper flags.” After the mass demonstration, he and his wife would set up a cauldron in the yard and stew Bulgarian tomato-pepper sauce. When the local party secretary asked him why he got a gum infection every September 9, he replied, “I can’t make head or tail of it, either…. My teeth are like those bourgeoisie they didn’t quite manage to kill off, they’re barely hanging on, and do nothing but cause me problems.” Called into the party office again, he was ordered to shave off his mustache and sideburns and to cut his hair and that of his sons, who were starting to look like the Beatles. Before complying, he had a photograph taken of himself with his facial hair intact.
The narrator selects the father’s best stories to give us a sense of what he was like, how energetic and funny he was, how large and vital a presence he seemed. After his first cancer surgery, a rumor went around his village that the gory operation had nearly sawed off his head. When a neighbor phoned to see whether he had in fact been semidecapitated, the father said, “Hang on a second while I get my head and I’ll tell you all about it…and the guy on the other end of the line hung up on him.” The father took the joke further. Dressed all in white, with a scarf around his neck as if to hide a gash, he returned to his hometown, where some of his neighbors had assumed that he was dead. “They were staring at me, he would say, and making the sign of the cross.”
The father’s anecdotes brighten the mood, but death is always waiting nearby to darken it again. Gospodinov captures the shock of the sheer unlikeliness of a loved one’s permanent absence. For forty days after the funeral, the narrator’s brother goes to the grave site to bring their father coffee and light up a cigarette: “A strange ritual, but deep down I am thankful he’s doing it.” He keeps looking for excuses to ask his brother “how things are there, what’s going on. It’s a cemetery, my brother replies, what could possibly be going on?” But that’s not exactly true. The brother is monitoring and reporting on the state of the memorial floral displays. “As long as the flowers last,” the narrator tells himself, “then my dad is fine, with all the conditionality of what it means to be ‘fine’ there.”
Gospodinov is eloquent about the mysterious hauntings that occur when the dead reappear in dreams and look out at us from the faces of strangers. On a plane to India, a spearmint leaf served with some goat cheese transports the son back in time: “With that tangy, chewed-up leaf, my father’s garden unfurls across my palate—and across the palace of the sky.” Set free to travel anywhere, the father’s ghost has developed a special fondness for airports. Undetected by the scanners, he waits patiently while his son’s suitcase is checked, “casually lighting up a cigarette despite the smoking bans, strolling around with that elegance of the luggage-less traveller.”
Allowing for different cultural norms and the infinite variety of individual personalities and parent–child relationships, the story that Death and the Gardener tells is sadly universal. For some, there will be almost overwhelming instances of déjà vu, which can make the book tough to read. But its quiet humor and the depth and elegance of its observations make it worth enduring the side effects. We never quite forget that the book must have been hard for the author to write, just as we are perpetually aware of his belief that transmuting his sorrow into sentences and paragraphs is the only thing that might possibly help:
I’m writing by hand for the first time in years. After discovering that this is the only way I can write about my father. I began while sitting at his bedside…. I kept asking him about his childhood. I turned the end into words so that it would be bearable.
One thinks of Where Reasons End (2019) and Things in Nature Merely Grow (2025), the beautiful books that Yiyun Li wrote after the deaths of her two sons. The first is a work of fiction, the second nonfiction, in which she writes:
I don’t want an end point to my sorrow…. What is grief but a word, a shortcut, a simplification of something much larger than that word?…
I prefer that in the abyss that is my habitat, grief is not given a place by design. If it decides to grow there, it will grow like a volunteer rose campion or a sweet violet or a columbine.
Gospodinov keeps returning to the relationship between death and the garden. “It seems to me that gardening is fundamentally in opposition to death,” he writes. “In the garden, you are always burying something and then waiting for a miracle to occur, for it to sprout, to become something different from the seed you sowed.” He muses on allegorical concepts that might have something in common with plants:
The idea of resurrection is, I think, a botanical idea…. All plants, which we view as less evolved than us, actually know one more miracle than we do…. They know how to die in such a way that they can come back to life again.
But his father’s garden ultimately can’t make death “bearable” or assuage his own pain. There are too many small, quotidian reminders of what he has lost. He can no longer enjoy a tangerine because it was the last fruit his father ate before he stopped eating completely. He keeps picking up the phone to call his father, then remembering that he is gone. His grief is intensified around 7:00 on winter evenings, especially as the New Year approaches and the television runs ads showing happy families gathered for the holidays. His father had so loved them that he’d asked his doctor to promise he would survive until Christmas: “Christmas might be possible, the doctor replied. And this answer was at once the most merciful and merciless I have ever heard.”
The world, we’re told, will always remain split into two parts: before and after the catastrophe. Daily life becomes a series of mournful firsts:
The first Christmas without him….
The first New Year when I don’t hear his voice at five past midnight.
My first trip abroad when he doesn’t wish me a safe flight.
My first birthday with no phone call from him.
Reading Death and the Gardener, I recalled something else: when there was an illness or death in my family or among my friends, I often walked around the city thinking that the people I was passing couldn’t possibly tell how unhappy and worried I was. And it would occur to me that some of the strangers I passed must be equally unhappy and worried and I couldn’t tell, either. Death and the Gardener confirms what we intuit at those moments: loss and grief are aspects of being human that time allows us to forget, if only temporarily.
By the end of Gospodinov’s novel we’re reminded that, as we have likely discovered on our own, magical thinking is an understandable but ultimately futile attempt to extend a life, to soften the hard finality and slow the erasures of death. Death and the Gardener suggests that the best way to preserve the spirit of a loved one is to create something that will remain—a garden, for example—and to keep telling the stories of those who can no longer tell them. The father was a gardener. Now he is a book.
English (US) · 