Death And the Gardener – Georgi Gospodinov

Description

My father was a gardener. Now he is a garden.
A man sits by his father’s bedside and reports radically and gently until a final winter morning.

His father was one of that generation of tragic smokers born right after the World War II in Bulgaria, who clung to the snorkels of their cigarettes. A rebel without a cause, he knew how to fail with heroic self-deprecation.

The garden he created out of a barren village yard first saved him, then killed him It remains his living legacy: peonies and potatoes, roses and cherry trees – and endless stories.

But without him, his son’s past, with all its afternoons, began to quietly crack. Because the end of our fathers is the end of a world.