Georgi Gospodinov's Death and the Gardener

"Surely this is why we tell stories. To create another parallel corridor where the world and everything in it are in their rightful places. To divert the story down another furrow when danger and death flood in, just as he would divert the water into another row in his garden."

He, in the sentence above, is the dying father of the narrator; the father liked to garden. The narrator is a middle-aged Bulgarian novelist whose name is only given as Georgi, and that only in the flap description.

Of the four novels of Gospodinov's I've read this easily feels the most autobiographical, but Gospodinov in a headnote insists it is a novel.

The father Dinyo had been diagnosed with fatal lung cancer seventeen years earlier. Rather miraculously at that time it had gone into remission, but now, in the late fall of 2023, it's come roaring back. Georgi starts a handwritten diary to deal with his feelings. When the first set of scans comes back, there's basically no hope:

"Well, at least till Christmas, we'll get together, see the snowdrops spring up, my father said, looking at the doctor with such expectation. Christmas was twenty days away, almost no time at all. 

Christmas might be possible, the doctor replied.

And this answer was at once the most merciful and merciless I have ever heard."

Georgi's father was a storyteller himself, not professionally, just in conversation, and when the present becomes too difficult to bear, Georgi recalls one of his father's stories. It's clear Georgi simply likes his father in addition to loving him. Georgi, the writer (and reader,) turns to other writers for consolation. There's Sontag, unsurprisingly, who herself was diagnosed with a cancer that was supposed to kill her, which went away for a number of years, but in the end did return; also Montaigne, various stoics, Borges. Homer, and here as well, is a frequent touchstone for Gospodinov.

There are a few markers this is a novel. Gaustine, a recurring character in Gospodinov's fiction, shows up in this, but mostly to be quoted. Gospodinov uses himself as a character in other novels; The Physics of Sorrow is in some ways a generational family novel, but with an amusing medical/science-fiction-y twist to aid the narration. In the Booker International winner, Time Shelter, the writer Georgi Gospodinov is hired as a consultant for a psychological therapeutic project, because he's good at storytelling; Gaustine, though, makes the plot go in that novel. The distance in this between Georgi the character and Georgi Gospodinov the actual novelist feels much smaller. It's less expansive, less playful than his other novels, but also very touching.