Georgi Gospodinov’s Death and the Gardener: an absurdist elegy

Gospodinov’s own year is a whirlwind of prize-related activity, taking him far across Europe. His father’s life is equally full and active. The gardening is backbreaking work for a man of nearly 80; in December, five days before Christmas, he will die from a recurring cancer that had been in remission. “The garden was his other possible life,” writes Gospodinov in an exquisitely tender novel about the last pain-ridden days of a proud, unworldly man and a middle-aged son’s grief: a meditation on the meaning of fatherhood, and how childhood only really ends with the deaths of one’s parents. “The voice unused, and everything left unsaid. He would speak through it and his words were apples, cherries, big red tomatoes.”

Death and the Gardener is pleasurably absurdist yet elegiac. The story of a man who was “the hero of our childhood”, it also reflects on Bulgaria during and after Communist rule. It is full of revealing anecdotes, such as how each year a doctor’s note excused the father from the annual mandatory celebration of the Red Army’s arrival in Sofia in 1944. Instead, he would spend that day working the chushkopek (pepper roaster) on his balcony from where “he would wave … at all the folks heading to the demonstration, imitating the General Secretary of the Communist Party’s specific wrist movement”. He was a man as radical, in his own way, as his son’s illuminating prose.

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Photograph by Olena Malik/Getty Images