Garden, Ashes

Garden, Ashes (Serbo-Croatian: Bašta, pepeo) is a 1965 novel by Yugoslav author Danilo Kiš. Garden, Ashes is based on Kiš's childhood. An English translation, by William J. Hannaher, was published in 1975 by Harcourt.

The narrative is told from the perspective of a young boy, Andi Scham, who at the beginning of the novel resides in Novi Sad in Yugoslavia. His absent father, Eduard Schamm, is an eccentric and meticulous railway inspector and a writer whose unfinished work is the third edition of a travel guide called Bus, Ship, Rail and Air Travel Guide – the updated edition, which Scham will never complete, is to be encyclopedic in its scope. After being shot at by gendarme soldiers, Eduard relocates his family to Hungary where Andi enters primary school. Later Eduard is sent to a ghetto and is then deported to Auschwitz, never to return to his family. Eduard presumably dies in the camps, though Andi insists that his father has merely disappeared.

The narrative structure becomes even more fractured after Eduard's departure. Andi hallucinates that his father is following him in disguise and invents stories about his parents first meeting, and he and his mother attempt to bring Eduard back through metaphorical séances. Andi acknowledges that "ever since my father vanished from the story, from the novel, everything has come loose, fallen apart." In the final scene of the novel, Andi wanders through the same woods that were the setting for an earlier imagined encounter in which Eduard was accused of being an Allied spy. He claims that his father's "ghost" haunts those woods. Andi's mother encourages him to leave as it is getting dark.

The novel is structured as a "loosely connected chronological sequence of half-explained adventures". Most of the focus is on the father, and what happens to the mother and child, living with difficulty in impoverished circumstances, is only partially explained. Refusing to give any moral judgment of the father, Kiš portrays him as a complex character, "enigmatic and half-crazed..., a man with an eloquent tongue and a fanciful mind who frequently abandoned family, sobriety, and reason", according to Murlin Croucher. A central object in the novel is the Singer sewing machine of Scham's mother which, because it has created beautiful things, signifies beauty and home, but it becomes lost in the Holocaust.

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