Gardeners

by Véronique Bizot, Youna Kwak (Translator)

"Gardens are what is wanted. Gardens more than anything else, and supposedly for pleasure, though gardens are nothing but traps. Breathlessly pursuing gardens, we run straight into the lair of the wolf, and when we realize our mistake, are at the mercy of the gardeners."

Even the safe harbor of an ordinary house garden is transformed into bewildering, uncharted territory in Veronique Bizot's critically acclaimed short story collection Gardeners. If the poet Mahmoud Darwish once observed that "there is nothing left of us in the wilderness save what the wilderness kept for itself," so too, in the apartments, backyards, and hotel lobbies that are the settings for Bizot's sober, fabulist tales, it is domestic life that constitutes the truly wild terrains, in which we may yet barely survive. A man returns home after decades abroad, only to find that a phalanx of gardeners have massacred the treasured chaos of the land he once knew. Three siblings repair to an abandoned country estate after gambling debts have left them in ruin, but the neighbors they encounter there prove more menacing than the urban cutthroats they left behind. A retired archeologist vacationing at a posh resort in Portugal is thrust back into troubled memories of her past life, by an invasion of possibly imaginary rats. These and three other stories comprise Bizot's subtle and strange, tender and terrifying collection of stories. Celebrated in France for her dangerously straightforward, lyrically troublesome prose, Bizot has written six tales full of the alien monstrosities of ordinary life, where the quotidian rhythms of sibling squabbles, home maintenance, and friendly encounters with neighbors skim thinly over undercurrents of murderous intents. Everyday life is the palette from which she draws to paint portraits of loneliness, greed, jealousy, and despair, but with such a subtle touch that we find ourselves laughing at her sharp wit before falling under the spell of the extraordinarily bizarre and compelling universe that her characters inhabit. Under her masterful hand, the banal gestures of our living serve not only to survive but to construct a wondrous and unpredictable world—a world in which "most gardens are full of corpses."

Gardeners is a wild and unrelenting chorus of voices that thrilled me and terrified me in equal measure.
--Catherine Lacey, author of The Answers and Nobody Is Ever Missing

These are haunting and strangely beautiful stories. Bizot's characters interrogate and ultimately redefine our ideas of nature and social responsibility, leaving us to confront our expectations of each other and the world. We are indebted to Youna Kwak for bringing this unique voice into English and doing it so well.

--Peyton Burgess, author of The Fry Pans Aren't Sufficing

Gardeners is a captivating, hypnotic collection, thought-provoking and thick with the flavors of Beckett and Poe. I loved it, and carry the stories with me.
--Bill Loehfelm, author of Let the Devil Out

Véronique Bizot is a marvel. Her Gardeners is richly detailed—vivid, wild and beguiling without the starkness of much French experimental fiction. The unsettling air of these stories grows thicker as you move from one to the next. And Youna Kwak is a translator to keep your eye on. She has translated Bizot's stylized narrative with flair, offering a lean, expectant and yet deceptively simple prose—perfect for this collection.
--Peter Thompson, author of Winter Light

Not only is there an importance and influence of place in Bizot's stories, but, arguably even more essential, a confluence of the interiority of the place and the interiority of human existence.
--Adam Braver, author of November 22, 1963 and The Disappeared

136 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2008

Reviews

[Mike He · Rating 4 out of 5]

The six short stories in Gardeners are told in an unusual and subtle way, always with an interesting ending. The translation is beautiful.

[Rachel Pollock · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a subtly bizarre storyteller Bizot is. These stories are quietly simmering concoctions which enexorably boil over or slowly evaporate. I'm unfamiliar with contemporary French fiction but at times Bizot's voice reminds me of the oblique sardonic observations of 19th century French writers...the criticism of Berlioz perhaps, or the fatalistically wry novels of Zola.

I am admittedly disappointed in the short length of this collection and thus my lack of a five star rating--it feels like a chapbook and i wish it were longer. No fault of the translator/publisher, and perhaps story collections in Europe are typically shorter than US releases? Dunno. I just hope that more of this writer's work makes it into English translation.

Disclosure: I received an ARC of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest rating/review.