Gardening is more than a metaphor for me. I am, or
was, a gardener, with Sungold tomatoes and pole beans out back and petunias and
four o’clocks in the front. I once tripped and fell head-first into the front
garden. It was getting toward autumn and I might have been there until the
first frost arrived if the local preacher hadn’t been walking his dog nearby.
He is a small man, a cardiac patient too small rescue me from the garden. He
roused my tiny wife and she roused our burly neighbor Marco and they set me
upright on the porch. My wife asked the obvious question: “What were you
doing?” My reply was typical: “Getting a closer look at the coneflowers.” At
the time, she was undergoing chemo for breast cancer. She needed a laugh, or so
I thought.
But back to Gospodinov’s book. It’s magnificent. A
short book about the death of his father the gardener in the town of Y is
Bulgaria. It is rich with empathy and sadness but laced with humor. Wit, you
might say, humor that doesn’t call attention to itself. The best writers have
the gift.
I cried, though, as his father faded away. G is
unrelenting of the portrait of his father, a young man who went to the Balkan
War and then was a failed entrepreneur and then an aging magnificent gardener
at his modest house in Y. The writer gets me to care so much for this simple
human who lived a dynamic family life despite his many failures during life under
the Bulgarian commissars. There’s no pity here just plenty of attempts to
understand. The writer attaches no blame to his father’s stern ways. Most
importantly, there is no exploration of how this complicated man completely
fucked up his life. You know, those Tales of a Dysfunctional Family that once
filled the U.S. book charts.
There are plenty of those in the U.S. In my 21
years of writing and blogging, I may have written some. I apologize, Dad and
Mom, as I had yet to have the grumpy wisdom of an aging father.
What does it take to write like Gospodinov of
Bulgaria and Williams of Ireland? I had
to write a million words before I had the skills to write with any sort of wit
and wisdom. Just to understand what propels their writing took me seven-and-half
decades. I am so sad sometimes about my status as a disabled old man, a man who
survived a widowmaker heart attack at 62 and a bout with septicemia at 73. A
few months after I fell into the petunias, I underwent a spinal fusion that was
supposed to help me walk again but did not. I still require a walker or scooter
to get around. Poor pitiful me, as the ironic Warren Zevon song goes. Woe,
woe, woe is me.
As I read Gospodinov, I kept thinking of my family
members, ones that I had criticized in my mind and in print, usually in fiction.
The fog began to clear. I thought about the richness of people’s lives, the
sorrows and the joys. Why are we what we
are and what imprint do we leave? What can I write about that only I can grasp?
My purview is mine alone.
I ponder all of these things. And write.
Gospodinov’s appreciation of his parents’
generation was summed up in James Woods’ New Yorker review of the book (11/10/25
issue):
In 2023, [Gospodinov’s
novel] Time Shelter won the International Booker Prize. In the new book,
that good fortune is autofictionally transformed into this: “In May the novel I
had dedicated to my mother and father won a big prize. On that London night,
one of those few quickly jotted-down phrases in English was about the two of
them, now quietly crying with joy in a little south-eastern town, I said, ‘Indeed,
our pretty phrases stand upon their stooped shoulders.’”
Stooped shoulders? That’s on my mind as I write today.
