Permit this reader a moment of extreme autofiction fatigue: a longing for clearer genre guardrails. A little border edging ... Its 200-odd pages have a stop-and-start quality. But then haltedness is one of grief’s major hallmarks ... Is itself modest and shrugging — a tender shoot poking up through the gaudy foliage of fall publishing. It’s a consolation rather than a provocation, and occasionally darkly funny.
Anyone who has lost a loved one to cancer will recognize the brutal accuracy of Gospodinov’s depictions of how the disease slowly, then quickly, destroys a person from within ... The novel expands outward as it progresses, toward a more generalized exploration of fatherhood ... The garden, like the novel, may indeed be a genre specific to itself.
Reads with the intimacy of a memoir ... Short chapters trail off and are followed by an epilogue, but eventually, the narrator has no choice but to end the book, which has been a kind of memorial to the fathers who die on our watch.
This light, slight, melancholic little book is concerned with the transformation of one thing into another: a father’s life into the stories that can never replace him ... The narrator’s recollection is a collage of details, and it is in these that a portrait takes shape.
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 ... Vital and valuable.
There are some cliches, and the luxurious jetsetting of the narrator grows tiresome, but the occasional slip is easily forgiven in such a warm and melancholic write.
