Grief may or may not have its five stages, but the stages of dying are implacable. We witnesses know the scenes and the atrocious acts that compose them: the first signs (“I’ve been having some funny pains in my lower back”) followed by the medical sentence (a lung cancer has metastasized to the cerebrospinal canal), and then the wary measuring of the distance between sickbed and bathroom. There’s the child, now grown, who sits near the bed, pretending to read but in fact is keeping restless watch; the child’s awkwardness in front of the parent’s nakedness; the fentanyl patches, for the last stations of pain. And then the final night, as the child lies down beside his father and waits for the end: “I was seeing my father off and I wanted to accompany him at least to the doorway, as far as they let the living go.” The father dies at 5:17 in the morning, four days before Christmas, and, here again, the journey takes its only shape: “At five o’clock his breathing slowed, with longer intervals between breaths. Inhalation, a pause lasting a second or two or three; exhalation, a long pause; inhalation again, an even longer pause, one-two-three-four, exhalation, and . . . No inhalation followed.”

These particular yet universal stages appear in “Death and the Gardener” (Liveright), a new novel by the Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov. The story it tells—a son’s vigil through his father’s dying—feels unmistakably autobiographical, in part because the progression toward death is so minutely, possessively rendered. Here is the iron form of the grief memoir, no less powerful for its deep familiarity. That rigidity probably explains why Gospodinov chooses, against all evidence, to call the book a novel. 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” doesn’t read like a novel, but then neither do those earlier ones. They all read like Gospodinov novelties.

Whatever these constructions call themselves, reading Gospodinov’s fiction is like moving through a single domed dwelling: the mind of the maker. Take, for instance, two brief, lovely passages from the new book. (Gospodinov has been fortunate to have the same sensitive English translator, Angela Rodel, for his past three novels.) “My father was a sort of Atlas, holding the past on his shoulders,” the unnamed narrator says. “Now that he is gone, I can sense that whole past cracking, quietly collapsing in on me, burying me in all its afternoons. The quietly collapsing afternoons of childhood. And there is no one I can call to for help.” As he writes these words, “a heavy, constricting sorrow washes over me once again. It’s three in the afternoon. Afternoons will no longer be the same.”

Afternoon has a steady presence in Gospodinov’s work. “The Physics of Sorrow” offers a list of “cities that look empty at three in the afternoon,” beginning with Graz and Turin and ending with Cabourg and Rouen. In “Time Shelter,” amid one of those drifting passages that make this novelist such a teasing pleasure, the narrator recalls walking in Brooklyn and suddenly realizing that the light was “coming from another time.” It was the light of the nineteen-eighties, he thinks, light “as if from a Polaroid picture, lacking brightness, soft, making everything look slightly faded.” Afternoons are like that, he continues. The past somehow gently contaminates afternoons:

That’s where time visibly slows down, it dozes off in the corners, blinking like a cat looking through thin blinds. It’s always afternoon when you remember something, at least that’s how it is for me. Everything is in the light. I know from photographers that afternoon light is the most suitable of exposures. Morning light is too young, too sharp. Afternoon light is old light, tired and slow. The real life of the world and humanity can be written in several afternoons, in the light of several afternoons, which are the afternoons of the world.

So afternoon, for Gospodinov, is the time for boredom, memory, a kind of weightless solitude—and, now, the time for grief. The heedless afternoons of childhood meet the fatherless afternoons of late middle age, and the bereaved son is in danger of being buried in them.

All Gospodinov’s work is time-bound and time-free, haunted by time and fleeing from it. The past is always calling us back, but stories are made out of our journeys away from, as much as our returns to, that past. The Odyssey, Gospodinov suggests in one of the mini-essays in “Time Shelter,” is really a tale about returning to the past. And the past “is not the least bit abstract; it is made up of very concrete, small things.” His narrators—never too distinct from the author himself—relish exploring their childhoods in the Sovietized Bulgaria of the nineteen-seventies and eighties, measuring that artificially ossified world against modern consumerist Europe. These investigations are meticulous, tender, palpable: buildings and radios, cars and first kisses, songs and streets are all made newly alive in memory. Given the choice between erotic immortality with the nymph Calypso and a return to Ithaca, Odysseus chooses the latter—not only because of Penelope and Telemachus “but also because of something specific and trifling, which he called hearth-smoke, because of the memory of the hearth-smoke rising from his ancestral home.” From Ithaca’s orchard to his father’s garden, Gospodinov moves from mythic to mortal soil.

Homer’s tale, the author adds, is also “a book about searching for the father.” So the father—though not only the father, of course; in someone else’s book, the mother—is the past: he holds it on his shoulders like Atlas, and to lose the parent is to lose some of that past, some of that palpable world. Picking up the thread from his earlier work, Gospodinov returns in his new book to Homer. Near the end of the Odyssey, after landing in Ithaca, Odysseus travels to his aged father and finds him at work in his garden—a scene that moves both Odysseus and Gospodinov’s narrator. “Upon seeing Laertes crushed by old age and grief,” Gospodinov writes, “Odysseus hides behind a leafy tree and bursts into tears.” Odysseus tells his father that he keeps a good garden but does not take care of himself—“clearly something that all sons tell their fathers.”

Through memories of his late father, Gospodinov’s narrator returns once more to a Bulgarian past, now stretching back beyond his own childhood, across several lost generations. The father was a great storyteller, a great smoker (“who learned to smoke from the films of the fifties and sixties”), and, above all, a great gardener. One of his last jobs before the fall of Socialism was as a gardener and occupational-therapy coördinator at a remote psychiatric clinic. “He tended the garden alongside the patients—the mentally ill, alcoholics, drug addicts. They planted tomatoes, cabbages, peppers, flowers.” Gardening was the father’s own therapy, too. Wherever he lived, he turned his small plot of land into a garden. Seventeen years earlier, he had almost died of cancer, and gardening saved his life; he made the little desert of his back yard bloom. He spoke through the garden, “and his words were apples, cherries, big red tomatoes.” The son loved to visit him, especially in the spring, “burying my head amid the branches of a heavily blossoming plum tree, closing my eyes and listening to the buzzing Zen of the bees.”

Gardening fertilizes Gospodinov’s metaphors; as a writer, he is at his best when he can plant a metaphor and watch it grow. Practically speaking, the father—who receives a new cancer diagnosis in late November and dies at the end of December—leaves his two sons the complicated legacy of the achieved but now wintry garden. In this sense, a garden is no different from any parental inheritance: both blessing and burden. Should we retain it or remainder it? But a garden, unlike an unfinished manuscript, will bloom in the spring almost unaided, and it will bloom for its new owners, or for others altogether, as it bloomed for the father, with nature’s green indifference. Yet, if the father truly spoke through his apples, cherries, and tomatoes, then surely he will speak again, after his death, year after year. Hence Gospodinov’s plangent formulation: “Yes, my father was a gardener. Now he is a garden.” Unlike human beings, flowers and other plants have a superpower, the author muses: “They know how to die in such a way that they can come back to life again.” It is what the writer Marilynne Robinson calls “the resurrection of the ordinary.”

In fact, the garden is both metaphor and its opposite. The writer son makes metaphors out of the garden—indeed, out of the very idea of the garden-as-metaphor—while the father, who told great stories but was entirely unliterary, made a garden out of the earth. Gospodinov sharply turns thought into distilled image: “We need to tend our own garden, Voltaire said, but I wonder whether he ever planted as much as a cucumber? We know that at least two dozen labourers and servants, led by two experienced gardeners, worked in his garden. That metaphor of his is possible thanks to them, to all real gardeners. Our pretty phrases stand upon their stooped shoulders.”

Which roughly translates as: My weak writing stands upon my father’s strong non-writing. He’s the real gardener; I’m a tiller of phrases. Sure enough, “Death and the Gardener” measures not only the distance between the quarantined Bulgarian past of the Soviet era and the comparatively permissive present but also the distance between the austere life of a father who owned very little and who “has not gone anywhere in the last fifty years” and a narrator who writes internationally successful books, jets off to England or India, and who, we learn, spent a year as a fellow at the New York Public Library, where he befriended the late critic Joan Acocella.

How could there not be both pride and shame at the heart of this filial difference? The narrator’s father was a Bulgarian creature of his decidedly patriarchal time. He repressed pain, repressed self-expression. He was always “clinging to the snorkel of a cigarette.” After his death, the son finds a notebook—you wouldn’t call it a diary, Gospodinov says, because there’s nothing personal in it. In fact, he says, there is no great tradition of diarists, or even of epistolary novels, in Bulgarian history: “This is part of our innate muteness about all things personal.” In that antique world, the father was the silent enforcer, or worse: he ran what was known as “the slap factory.” (“Don’t make me turn on the slap factory.”) Fathers worked in the slap factory, Gospodinov writes, and mothers “were not above it either.” It was simply the culture, now disappearing. By contrast, the son lives in our blessedly affectionate domestic world, of kisses and hugs and daily “I love you”s. He is himself a very different father. His nine-year-old daughter asks one day, “Daddy, what’s a slap?”

Fortunately, the narrator’s father was so tall and gruff that his natural sternness did all the slapping. For punishment, he might banish his son to the cellar, but he couldn’t really bear it and would release him after fifteen minutes. The portrait that emerges is nicely complex and contradictory. The father was a stern softie. The son may have travelled far from his parents’ lives, but he is proud of them, and they of him. 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 somewhere—he just happened to till it. Perhaps his father was no writer, but we are told that this same patriarch learned by heart all the “terrible poems” his son wrote when he was young. Gospodinov dedicated his previous novel, “Time Shelter,” to his parents: “To my Mother and Father, who are still weeding the eternal strawberry fields of childhood.” In 2023, “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. ♦