#RivetingReviews: Rosie Goldsmith reviews DEATH AND THE GARDENER by Georgi Gospodinov, translated by Angela Rodel

This is a sad book, a beautiful book. It’s about the death of a father – the death of the narrator’s father, the death also of Georgi Gospodinov’s father. (As so often in his work, Gospodinov is both participant and observer.) Death and the Gardener is enquiring about the human condition; it’s wise, it’s lyrical; it will leave you feeling bereft as well as enriched and hopeful.

‘The truth is that I have thought about this moment many times over the years, I have feared it, imagined it in detail. It’s one of my first childhood fears, my first nightmare’

Gospodinov is such a quotable writer. With all his books (and I’ve read all those in English translation), I find myself writing out whole sentences, even paragraphs, to try to anchor the poetry or the mood in my mind. His wisdom is not self-aggrandising or arrogant, but human and often humorous. Take the first page:

‘My father was a gardener. Now he’s a garden.

I don’t know where to begin. Let that be the beginning.

Yes, we’re talking about an end, of course, but where does the end begin?

I think I wet myself, my father said on the threshold.’

His beloved tall, hard-smoking, hard-working father, a child of Communist Bulgaria, a maverick who never toed the line, now in his retirement tending his beloved garden, is in his late seventies and has terminal cancer. He has left his village to spend his last few weeks in the capital, Sofia, close to medical care and to his son and family. It is obvious that the son has inherited his great storytelling skills:

‘The catalogue of (my father’s) illnesses and injuries really sounded as epic as the catalogue of ships in the Iliad. It was even more sumptuous and vivid than the forging of Achilles’ shield … My father kept telling tale after tale, his storytelling a matter of life and death.’

We learn that the narrator is a celebrated Bulgarian writer, sought after at home and abroad. (Gospodinov and his translator Angela Rodel won the 2023 International Booker Prize for Time Shelter, and since then global acclaim.) From the start of this ‘novel’ (it is surely more of a memoir?) the narrator sets out his stall:

‘Only the storytellers survive, but they, too, will die one day.

Only the stories survive.

And the garden, which my father had planned before he died.

Surely this is why we tell stories. To create another parallel corridor where the world and everything in it are in their rightful places.’

The garden is both real and a metaphor. The language of growth and decay, ecology and nature, is a gift for the writer. The flowers and vegetables were planted in barren land and flourish thanks to the father’s digging, sowing, watering – and love. Like many Bulgarian fathers of his generation, he rarely verbalised his love or emotions, the garden expressed this for him:

‘The garden was his other possible life, the voice unused and everything left unsaid. He would speak through it, and his words were apples, cherries, big red tomatoes’

We know that the father dies in the novel. He is in excruciating pain. The reluctance of the author to write about the moment of death – and the difficulty of finding adequate words to do so – is reflected in the fragmentary structure of the novel, as the author goes backwards and forwards through family, and Bulgarian, history and distracts himself with childhood memories or stories of Ancient Greece or Thomas Mann. He writes in the first person and the present tense. In writing about death, he is putting it off, and the reader is carried along with him in his pain and sorrow. About a third of the way through the novel, he is ready:

‘And now the most difficult part of the story begins. Let’s take a deep breath and get through it together. I’ve prepared first-grade stories as well, in case first-aid is needed. Nothing to fear.’

During his father’s final hours, he comments simply:

‘And I, who believe in words, had no words.’

This is a heartbreaking moment, also for the reader, for all of us who have been through the loss of a loved one. I felt like weeping, but was comforted too in the knowledge that, as ever with Gospodinov, I am in safe hands. I trust him as a writer. I feel his empathy. From now on, and for the rest of the novel, his task is to study survival, and how to live after losing his father:

‘Our personal chronicles change after such events, opening up new eras. You start saying, yes, that was before my father died.’

He continues to write and to travel, his father a presence in the faces and gestures of others, in tastes and smells, ‘a la Proust, via a specific scent or taste, through the memory of the palate’.

The son is woefully ignorant and incompetent as a gardener. He recalls Voltaire’s phrase, ‘We need to tend our own garden’, but, he queries, did Voltaire ever ‘plant as much as a cucumber?’ However, it is through the garden that the son best connects with his father and with the meaning and significance of his death. Gospodinov rarely refers to God or religion, but there is something biblical in his concluding thoughts, and in what he refers to memorably as ‘the botany of sorrow’:

‘Gardening and death. It seems to me that gardening is fundamentally in opposition to death. 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, green and slender, with leaves and flowers, with fruit, something different, yet also a repetition, the same thing, flesh of its flesh … The idea of resurrection is, I think, a botanical idea. This is where the allegory comes from, that’s what started it. Immortality is also a botanical concept. All plants, which we view as less evolved than us, actually know one more miracle than we do, they have one more superpower. They know how to die in such a way that they can come back to life again.’

For Georgi Gospodinov and for his exquisite translator Angela Rodel (both have experienced recent family deaths), this beautiful slim volume is above all a tribute, specifically and universally, not only to gardeners but to storytellers:

‘I think perhaps this was my father’s mission, though he did not know it: to serve as the shepherd of a small flock of stories, which he raised himself and which followed him around everywhere at his heels. Or simply to be a gardener – there in the garden of stories and family trees.’

Reviewed by Rosie Goldsmith

DEATH AND THE GARDENER

by Georgi Gospodinov

Translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel

Published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson (2025)

September 2025 #RivetingReviews titles are available to buy from bookshop.org.

Rosie Goldsmith is Director and Founder of the European Literature Network and Editor-in-Chief of The Riveter. She was a BBC broadcaster for twenty years and is today an arts journalist and presenter. She was chair of the judges for the EBRD Literature Prize 2018–2020.

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