Death and the Gardener: Saying “Nothing to Fear”

Part of: The Deep Reader

Author Hub: Georgi Gospodinov

Spoiler notice: This essay discusses the father's death, the gardening notebook, and the ending of Death and the Gardener.

Whatever the son asks, his father has the same answer. Does his lower back hurt? Has he lost weight? “Nothing to fear,” he says in Death and the Gardener (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2025, p. 4).

The questions grow more particular while the reply stays reassuringly unchanged. Familiarity makes it easy to accept. Only when Georgi Gospodinov returns to the conversation after his father's death does he hear the addition made as they hugged goodbye: “Nothing to fear, I'll wait for you to get back” (p. 4). The sentence that sent him on his way also asked him to return.

Gospodinov writes a beautiful declaration of a son's love out of this belated attention. His father gardens, tells stories, makes people laugh, and continues to protect his children from worry while he is dying. The book is warm and sad, occasionally more sentimental than I would like, though I find those excesses forgivable. Its affection is persuasive because we come to recognize a particular man's way of looking after people. Reading it brought back Philip Roth's Patrimony. Here, what most stays with me is the son's gradual adoption of a voice he can no longer hear in reply.

The father's little reassurance travels far beyond that October conversation. It enters the deathbed scene, where the son says it back to him, and the instructions Gospodinov gives us as we approach that scene. He also borrows his father's habit of interrupting distress with a story. We begin to experience a form of care we have first encountered as a trait in the man being remembered. The book's confidence in this inheritance is moving; so are the moments when a notebook or an untended garden shows how much the son still cannot do.

A Story Before the Next Breath

Before describing the final night, Gospodinov asks us to take a deep breath and promises stories if first aid is needed. The paragraph ends with his father's reassurance (p. 77). This invitation has an unusual intimacy. A writer who is about to describe his own vigil attends to our capacity to read it, as if the father had taught him how to receive someone frightened into a room.

In bed beside him, he remembers lying together during a childhood hailstorm. Now the father can barely move, and the son adjusts his oxygen tubes, holds his hand, and speaks the words that once comforted him. Gospodinov explicitly calls this fathering his father. The phrase gives the scene its interpretation, but the quieter transfer has already occurred in his address to us. We have been made listeners to the father's manner before watching the son speak it at the bedside.

The chapter ends, “I'll continue in a moment” (p. 78). What follows takes us back a week, to a painful medical visit and the climb to the son's apartment. When the narrative returns to the vigil, the son wipes away blood and watches his father look at his wristwatch. He breaks off again, this time asking for a “first-rate first-aid story” (p. 82). In Rodel's English, the near repetition lets the remembered pleasure of a good story turn into an immediate need for one.

His father's camping story supplies the interval. Too tall to fit inside the tent, he sleeps outside while the boys worry about a bear; in his joking account, bread and cheap wine should help him deal with it. Morning brings the children's fear that he has been eaten, then the father running from the bushes, equally frightened for them. Gospodinov gives the recollection room to recover its comic timing. The worried children and their worried father have each mistaken an absence, and the reunion releases both alarms. For a few paragraphs, this is a man capable of coming back when his sons cannot find him.

The next chapter begins, “Let's try this again” (p. 85). The plural brings us back with the writer. A persuasive account of the book's consolations describes the family stories as a way of facing loss while keeping some distance from it. That distance has a measurable shape here: the intervening chapter has allowed us to leave the bedside, and its ending makes us return. We carry the father's comic reappearance into a passage in which the next small return becomes harder to expect.

When I glanced again at my watch, it was 3.40; he also glanced at his, perhaps he was waiting for dawn, then he dozed off for a bit; it was four o'clock, then 4.10, then 4.30. The last thing he did – he could no longer speak – was that half-circle with his hand. Was he trying to gather us to tell us something? Or did he simply want to tell us to stick together? I'll spend the rest of my life interpreting that gesture. 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. He expired – how precise that word is – at 5.17 in the morning.

— Georgi Gospodinov, Death and the Gardener, translated by Angela Rodel (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, first UK edition, 2025), p. 85.

The clock initially advances by ten or twenty minutes within a sentence. As breathing slows, a few seconds take more language. We move from reading the times on a watch to counting an interval with the person beside the bed. The recurring inhalation teaches us what should follow the exhalation; the final “and” keeps that expectation open until the next sentence reports its failure. After so many departures from the vigil and returns to it, the prose reaches a pause from which the father cannot return.

Gospodinov leaves the gesture immediately before this sequence unsettled. Its possible meanings remain questions. He can report the hour of death with terrible precision, while what his father wanted to say will occupy the rest of his life. Those neighboring kinds of attention give the passage its restraint. We are allowed the exact minute without being handed a final message that would make the death easier to arrange.

The Month Between Two Entries

The father's black notebook requires another kind of close reading. Its ordinary entries record what he planted and watered, quantities and dates useful to someone doing the work again. The son copies them into a book written after their author has died. When an entry records eight kilos of potatoes planted in March, he adds that these are the potatoes the family will eat after the father's death (pp. 113–116). A record made for the next season acquires a future its writer did not put there.

We can see the two men's purposes separating on the page. The gardener needs to know what was done and when; the son keeps noticing how much life remained at the time of writing. Even abundance begins to count down. Then the notebook itself changes, and the son searches its reduced wording for evidence he failed to understand while his father was alive.

The last note in my father's black notebook for September is from the 25th. And it says: Wat. grhs. He had gathered the strength to water the greenhouse, but not to finish his note. Like a graphologist who has arrived too late, I try to decipher the level of pain that makes you abbreviate both words like that. There were no abbreviations in his previous notes. The date on the next page is much further on: 28 October 2023. He's written the year as well for the first time. He hasn't written anything for more than a month between 25 September and 28 October. This lacuna is the most painful one in the notebook. A month of silence. Clearly he was starting to experience a lot of pain, his body began giving out, or he no longer saw the point in keeping notes. The handwriting in the final note is slightly different, in large, almost printed letters that go outside the lines he has written: DICLOPRAM FOR PAIN He has underlined it twice.

— Georgi Gospodinov, Death and the Gardener, translated by Angela Rodel (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, first UK edition, 2025), p. 119; italics in the original.

Two shortened words attract more scrutiny than many of the complete entries. The son has to expand them to recover the ordinary action, and that small effort makes him imagine the greater effort involved in performing it. Rodel's clipped forms stop before the task has been fully named. We then pass across a month the father has left unrecorded. When the capitals finally appear, the notebook's orderly relation between a date and a gardening job has given way to the name of a painkiller and the reason for taking it.

The son calls himself a graphologist who has arrived too late. His accuracy cannot be disentangled from that lateness. He can compare the letters, register the unprecedented abbreviation, and notice the year suddenly written in full; he still has to offer alternatives for the silence between entries. Perhaps the body was giving out, perhaps recording the work no longer seemed worthwhile. The page lets us follow his inference without supplying the missing month's account in the father's voice.

Within that gap, on October 8, father and son had attended a play drawn from Gospodinov's work. The father seemed to enjoy the drinks and conversation afterward, and the son left the following day reassured (pp. 120–121). Setting the occasion against the notebook revises a memory of companionship without canceling its pleasure. The father could still make an evening feel happy while something serious remained unspoken. The son's later attention to the handwriting grows from this painful discrepancy between having spent time together and having understood what was happening.

The notebook also survives for purposes someone cannot fulfill by interpreting it. When spring comes, the son does not know how to plant a cherry tree, treat aphids, or space tomatoes. He and his brother consult the dates to work out what should be done (pp. 198–199). Their father has left instructions, but much of his competence went unwritten because he already possessed it. The book makes us attentive to the marks on the page while admitting the limits of that attention. A loving reading of the gardener's handwriting can help the son recognize what he has lost; the garden will still need someone who knows how to prune.

His Father Can Answer Back

This admission is especially welcome as the book sometimes presses its tenderness too insistently. In an imagined speech by the bereaved dog, promises accumulate: it will stop eating the cat's food, tugging at trousers, disturbing the other animals, and trampling flowers, if only its owner comes back (p. 92). The repetition turns familiar animal mischief into the bargaining of a child who thinks better behavior might reverse a departure. I find the feeling understandable and the appeal overextended. By the time the promises reach the tulips and geraniums, there is little room left for a response other than the sadness the passage has been arranging.

These moments rarely spoil the warmth for me, partly because the father elsewhere retains the capacity to make affection awkward. He has already appeared in his son's fiction, in a comic story about secretly hanging out the laundry. When acquaintances discover it, they telephone to tease him. The son suggests that being put in a story deserves gratitude. His father answers, “OK fine, you put me in a story, but with my pants down” (p. 181). He gives the title's joke back to its author with the inconvenience restored. Literary preservation has consequences for the person who still has to answer the telephone.

He is hardly innocent of exposing other people to laughter. In his account of an early attempt at pancakes, repeated corrections to the batter produce enough food for four school classes, with two buckets left over. His wife objects to the exaggeration. He agrees to reduce it to three classes and one bucket (p. 182). The concession is timed like a reasonable settlement, although it preserves the fantastic scale of the story. We hear why his family enjoys him and why living with his versions of events might be irritating. Gospodinov can express love by keeping the irritation audible.

Near the end, the writer imagines his father reading over his shoulder and correcting which village a traffic policeman came from (pp. 200–201). The correction is openly imagined, and its modest subject gives it credibility as a remembered manner. A father whose last hand gesture cannot be translated with confidence can still be recalled disputing a location in a story. The son misses this ordinary interference: someone close enough to his writing to have an objection. An earlier Gospodinov mourner also keeps the dead particular by arguing with him: in “A Living Soul,” the old man’s address to Souluk lets remembered jealousy remain active inside the conversation.

The Date He Asked For

Early in the book, the father asks his doctor whether he can live until St. George's Day. He describes the family meal they could have, with lamb, garlic, and spearmint, so appetizingly that the doctor stops writing to listen. For a moment, his storytelling gathers another person around the proposed table. The doctor gives no answer. The father reduces his request to hearing the cuckoo in April, then to Christmas, twenty days away (pp. 25–26).

The shortening is unbearable because the father performs it so politely. Each smaller occasion gives the doctor another chance to grant something. Details of a feast contract into the sound of a bird and finally a holiday already close at hand. His gift for creating company through words is still working: the doctor has listened, the son has imagined the meal, and we can picture the garden in spring. None of them can give him the days he is asking for.

Gospodinov dates the Epilogue May 6, 2024, St. George's Day. He has confirmed that he finished the book on that date, the day for which his father had bargained. By then, the notebook has been read, the jokes retold, the last breath counted, and the spring gardening found difficult. Completion can keep this appointment only in the son's life.

A cuckoo calls in the Epilogue, and the father's reassurance becomes the book's final sentence: “There's nothing to fear.” We have heard it conceal pain, comfort the dying man, and invite us to continue reading. Now the son writes it after reaching the spring his father wanted. He knows how little it can promise. He has also learned how much a familiar voice can give someone who is afraid.

Sources

Georgi Gospodinov, Death and the Gardener, translated by Angela Rodel (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, first UK edition, 2025), ebook ISBN 9781399631051. All page references and primary quotations refer to this edition's embedded pagination. The Epilogue is unpaginated in its page list.

Amber Ruth Paulen, “Growing, Growing, Gone: A Review of Death and the Gardener by Georgi Gospodinov”, Asymptote, October 2, 2025.

Georgi Gospodinov, interviewed by Angela Rodel, “Georgi Gospodinov on the Loss of His Father and Writing About Death”, Literary Hub, November 5, 2025.

Philip Roth, Patrimony, Penguin Books title page. Cited to identify the reading association.