Grief for oneself in an abandoned world

"My father was a gardener.

- Rahul Singh

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 Prizewinning pair return with another novel that makes the reader think about the myriad intricacies of the heart.

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 in the 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.

While the story is laden with grief, the book also offers a rich portrait of a man who grew up in the postwar period and lived in Bulgaria when it was a Soviet satellite state. The author brings historical moments to light without making an undue show of pain or want. The father’s childhood is explored 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”.