Catch the Rabbit
By Lana Bastašić
Translated from Serbo-Croatian by the author
Restless Books, 2021

Road trip narratives don’t work in Bosnia, at least not according to Sara, the narrator of Lana Bastašić’s debut novel Catch the Rabbit, a work translated from the Serbo-Croatian by the author herself. For Sara, “[A] road-trip story makes sense only when the travellers, albeit wrongly, believe in reaching the finish line, the journey’s end that will solve all problems and end all misery. There’s no finish line in Bosnia…”

Sara is pulled into this particular journey by a call from her erstwhile best friend, Lejla. Now living in Dublin with her boyfriend, Sara has tried to put the events of her childhood behind her, neither returning to her homeland nor speaking its language. Yet as she says her friend’s name, “...the longest and thickest roots came spilling out from the mud... A whole language buried deep inside me, a language that had waited patiently for that little word to stretch its numb limbs and rise as if it had never slept at all.” Lejla has found out that her brother (and Sara’s first and unfulfilled love), Armin, who went missing during the Bosnian war, is alive, and she wants Sara to drive her from Mostar to Vienna to meet him. Reluctantly Sara agrees, falling down a memory rabbit hole of war, division, and an intense friendship from which she has never recovered.

Loosely structured around the twelve chapters of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Catch the Rabbit bounces between the present and the past. There is something of Wonderland in the Bosnia of Sara and Lejla’s childhood, where innocence is replaced by the topsy-turvy terrain of war. New identities are taken on overnight (Lejla becomes Lela to hide her Muslim and Bosniak heritage in a region where Orthodox Serbs are the majority); dogs start dying and Bosniak teenagers are blamed; a father who laments that his injured leg prevented him from teaching his daughter to ride a bike also vows that were it not for his leg, “Daddy would wipe them all off the face of the earth;” young men go missing without warning; and the body of a teenager appears facedown in the river. Images of roots, buried springs, and catacombs predominate, with these subterranean elements calling to mind not only Sara and Lejla’s descent into a darker and more adult world but also the contested and blood-soaked land of the Balkans.

Sara may not believe in the possibility of a resolution at the journey’s end, but she does believe in the power and control of narrative. Since the dissolution of her friendship with Lejla, she has written in order “to be a god of certain small worlds.” The novel is written as her own, possibly fictionalized, account of the trip and their friendship, often addressed to Lejla herself. From the beginning Sara worries that Lejla “would sneak between two sentences like a moth between two slats of a venetian blind, and would finish my story off from the inside,” enhancing her role and diminishing Sara’s. She worries about being consumed by Lejla, yet she writes to her that she wanted to “suck your essence out through your mouth, like a parasite.” She is at times deeply loyal to Lejla, even worshipful of her power, but also envies her and fantasizes about situations where she can prove herself superior. Deeply entwined, the two may seek Armin, but they can only find each other; they may pass borders, but they can never escape Bosnia, which lives inside them “like a phantom itch.” The convincing depiction of a troubled friendship between two young girls is reminiscent of Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye in its suffocating immediacy.

Sara and Lejla act as foils for each other, and in this continually shifting relationship of opposites Bastašić excels at casting doubt on the veracity of Sara’s perspective. Sara longs for containment and order, whereas Lejla is described as a person who “spread[s] out infinitely” and who embraces the chaos of the universe. She is set apart from Sara and her peers by her ethnicity, religion, and class, but retains a determined boldness and uniqueness, while Sara is capable of casual cruelty to gain the acceptance of others.

In one thrilling section, Bastašić turns the tables and allows the adult Lejla to speak. She is aware that Sara looks down on her and admonishes her for her privilege: “You think people choose everything in their lives. Because you have spent your whole life choosing everything.” How much of Sara’s portrayal of Lejla is fair and how much of it reveals a wilful blindness to the differences in their experience? Each remembers key events differently. On their prom night, they lose their virginity next to each other on a riverbank. Sara is full of envy and remembers her date as mimicking Lejla’s date’s moves, so that “my special night was just a copy of yours.” In contrast, Lejla remembers disliking her own date, while Sara’s date was crazy about her and even brought her flowers.

Whose version of events is correct? Bastašić never lets us come to an answer, crafting a complex narrative that reveals how our twinned friendships and resentments shape us forever, regardless of their truth. The result is an unsettling and deeply engrossing novel that will appeal to anyone who has loved a friend deeply, believed in a specific story about their past, or sought to leave their homeland behind.

—Anna Matthews is a writer and avid reader living in the East Midlands of the United Kingdom.