Garden, Ashes

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.

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.

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.

Mark Thompson describes Andi as a "hybrid narrator who blends the expressive power of an accomplished artist with the limited understanding-- but the unlimited imagination, or intuition-- of a young person.

Like his fictional counterpart, Eduard Kiš narrowly escaped a shooting death by gendarme officers in Novi Sad, then relocated his family to Hungary.

Though he is not successful in this endeavor, Andi's struggle with his own mortality reveals the character's sensitive nature and makes clear that Kiš does not idolize childhood innocence.

He then begins to channel his "darkest impulses" into his dreams, eating the poppyseed cakes that are denied him in his real life or pursuing a village woman with whom he is fascinated.

Kiš wrote Garden, Ashes long before lucid dreaming became a well-researched field of study.

Murlin Croucher praised the "rich yet youthful and slightly hyperbolic style", though he felt that the book lacked an overall purpose.

Aleksander Stević argues that Kiš chooses to have Andi suppress memories of the Holocaust so as to give Eduard autonomy.

[12] Garden, Ashes is often compared to Fatelessness, a 1975 semi-autobiographical novel by Hungarian author Imre Kertész.

György continually tries to normalize and reconcile what he has seen in the camps, as a way of coping with horrific events, much like how Andi suppresses images of the war.

Fatelessness and Garden, Ashes were published at a time when discussion on the Holocaust were discouraged by the Hungarian and Yugoslav governments.