A Bulgarian Novelist Explores What Dies When Your Father Does
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.”
