A Bulgarian novelist explores what dies when your father dies

This is where time visibly slows down, snoozes in the corners, and flashes like a cat peering through thin curtains. It’s always noon when you remember something, at least that’s the case for me. Everything is in the light. I know from photographers that afternoon light is best for exposure. The morning light is so small, so sharp. The afternoon light is old, tired and slow. The true life of the world and humanity can be written in several afternoons, in light of several afternoons, which are the afternoons of the world.

So the afternoon, for Gospodinoff, is a time of boredom, memory, and a kind of weightless solitude, and now is a time of sadness. The reckless afternoons of childhood are matched by the fatherless afternoons of late middle age, in which the bereaved son is in danger of being buried.

All of Gospodinov’s works are bound by time and free of time, haunted and evaded by time. The past always calls us back, but stories are made as much from our journeys away from that past as from our return to it. In one of the vignettes in “The Temporal Shelter,” Gospodinoff suggests that “The Odyssey” is actually a story about a return to the past. The past “is not at all abstract; it consists of small, very concrete things.” Its narrators—not so different from the author himself—relish exploring their childhoods in Soviet Bulgaria in the 1970s and 1980s, measuring that artificially fossilized world against modern consumerist Europe. These investigations are precise, gentle, and tangible: buildings, radios, cars, first kisses, songs, and streets all come alive in memory. Given a choice between sexual 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 trivial, which he called hearth-smoke, because of the memory of hearth-smoke rising from his ancestral home.” From the Ithaca orchard to his father’s garden, Gospodinoff moves from legendary soil to deadly soil.

The author adds that Homer’s tale is also “a book about the search for a father.” So the father, but not just the father of course; In someone else’s book, the mother —He is The past: he carries it on his shoulders like an atlas, and losing a father means losing some of that past, some of that tangible world. Picking up the thread from his previous work, in his new book Gospodinoff returns to Homer. Near the end of the Odyssey, after landing in Ithaca, Odysseus travels to his elderly father and finds him working in his garden—a scene that moved both Odysseus and Gospodinoff’s narrator. “Seeing Laertes ruined by old age and grief, Odysseus hid behind a leafy tree and burst into tears,” Gospodinoff wrote. Odysseus tells his father that he keeps a good garden but doesn’t take care of himself – “apparently that’s something all sons say to their fathers.”

Through memories of his late father, Gospodinov’s narrator returns once again to the Bulgarian past, which now extends beyond his childhood, across several lost generations. Father was a great storyteller, a great smoker (“He learned to smoke from movies of the 1950s and 1960s”), and above all, a great gardener. One of his last jobs before the fall of socialism was working as a gardener and occupational therapy coordinator at a telepsychiatric clinic. “He tended the garden alongside the sick – the mentally ill, alcoholics, drug addicts. They grew tomatoes, cabbage, peppers, and flowers.” Gardening was dad’s therapy too. Wherever he lived, he turned his small plot of land into a garden. Seventeen years ago, he nearly died of cancer, and gardening saved his life; He made the little desert in his backyard flourish. He was talking in the garden, “and his words were apples, cherries, big red tomatoes.” The son loved to visit him, especially in the spring. “I would bury my head in the branches of a plum tree, close my eyes and listen to the buzzing of the bees.”