Death and the Gardener: A Novel [Hardcover]

A The author, a naturally playful fabulist, is furloughed here into invention and free play. Around the remembered realities, he can weave the digressions, autofictional essays, and genial thought experiments that made such earlier works as The Physics of Sorrow and Time Shelter beautifully unconfining vessels. Death and the Gardener doesnt read like a novel, but then neither do those earlier ones. They all read like Gospodinov novelties. . . This is inevitably a sad book in places, yet it is lit with remembered warmth, happiness, laughter, and a kind of lightness characteristic of its writer. The joyful novelist got his joy from somewherehe just happened to till it. Epigrammatic and intimate . . . A consolation rather than a provocation, and occasionally darkly funny . . . It might have you mulling your own pithy epitaph. A tender, lyrical meditation on a fathers death and a sons grief . . . Throughout the pages of Profoundly moving . . . more a celebration of life than a chronicle of sorrow . . . Like Seamus Heaney, Mr. Gospodinov digs with his pen. What sprouts up is a portrait of devotion, love and respect, of time passing and roles reversing. A writer of great warmth as well as skill. This is a difficult book to read at times, and in all likelihood most difficult for those to whom it speaks most directly, those who have experienced the same suffering. But they may also find a welcome recognition and empathy, and the beauty from truth that the best art delivers . . . to the select canon of worthwhile books about fathers, Gospodinov has created a vital and valuable addition. Through the power and magic of fiction, Gospodinov transforms his individual mourning into a sensitive and moving work of art that is both devastating and comforting. An exquisitely tender novel about the last pain-ridden days of a proud, unworldly man and a middle-aged sons grief: a meditation on the meaning of fatherhood, and how childhood only really ends with the deaths l3¨