LAST HARVEST

Georgi Gospodinov's new novel probes what dies when your father does.

- BY JAMES WOOD

"My father was a gardener," the novel's narrator reflects. "Now he is a garden."

Grief may or may not have its five stages, but the stages of dying are implacable. We witnesses know the scenes and the atrocious acts that compose them: the first signs (“I’ve been having some funny pains in my lower back”) followed by the medical sentence (a lung cancer has metastasized to the cerebrospinal canal), and then the wary measuring of the distance between sickbed and bathroom. There’s the child, now grown, who sits near the bed, pretending to read but in fact is keeping restless watch; the child’s awkwardness in front of the parent’s nakedness; the fentanyl patches, for the last stations of pain. And then the final night, as the child lies down beside his father and waits for the end: “I was seeing my father off and I wanted to accompany him at least to the doorway, as far as they let the living go.” The father dies at 5:17 in the morning, four days before Christmas, and, here again, the journey takes its only shape: “At five o’clock his breathing slowed, with longer intervals between breaths. Inhalation, a pause lasting a second or two or three; exhalation, a long pause; inhalation again, an even longer pause, one-two-three-four, exhalation, and . . . No inhalation followed.”