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.
