Catch The Rabbit by Lana Bastašić
Review by Elodies Barnes
The debut novel by Lana Bastašić, Catch The Rabbit won the European Prize for Literature in 2020, and has been translated from Serbo-Croatian into English by the author. It explores the complex relationship between Sara and Lejla, childhood friends who grew up surrounded by the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia. Years later, Sara, now living and studying in Dublin, receives an out-of-the-blue phone call from Lejla asking her to return to Bosnia to help find Lejla’s brother Armin, missing since the war. The resulting road trip from Mostar to Vienna, where Armin is rumoured to be alive and well, is a Wonderland-esque journey through landscapes both physical and emotional, real and imaginary, through the reality of the present into the memories of the past.
The book is structured in sections, taking the reader back and forth between the present journey and events from Sara and Lejla’s childhood. There are more than a few touches of Alice in Wonderland: a stolen white rabbit, a deep descent into catacombs, a bus ride in which Sara imagines the same people taking the same bus on the same loop, day after day. There are also Joycean elements, tying in nicely with Sara’s choice of city for her new life: in the same way as Finnegan’s Wake, the novel begins and ends in the middle of a sentence. With these undertones, the delicate and surreal language (translated beautifully into English by Bastašić) gives the story a slightly unsettled quality. If this is Wonderland, anything could happen.
Indeed, in the Bosnia of Sara’s memory, nothing is certain, and her reliability as a narrator is called into question with increasing frequency throughout their journey. She is the one telling the story, not Lejla (‘She is three hits on the keyboard’), but from the beginning Lejla resists being placed into a narrative (‘Even now, within this text, I can almost feel her fidget’). From her earliest recollections of their friendship, the bookish and quiet Sara contrasted herself to the wild, reckless Lejla, leaving her feeling inadequate and wrong even when the comparison existed only in her own mind. She recalls feeling dominated and subsumed by Lejla’s personality, yet unable and unwilling to change the dynamics: ‘You were different. There was an untouchable wisdom in your attitude, which dictated that you were the leader and I the follower, like we belonged to different suborders of primates.’
Sara’s choices - in what to study, where to live, what to pursue as a career - all come under condescending fire from Lejla, both in reality and in Sara’s mind. ‘You showed up at the launch of my poetry collection….you glanced at it with contempt…copies of my book were lined up on the table. You gave them a look of pity, as if they were dead birds I had stepped on as well.’ But as the journey through Bosnia to Austria progresses, through the ‘living, tangible’ darkness of the metaphorical rabbit hole, Sara is confronted with the adult Lejla as well as the adult version of herself. They have grown up, apart, and what she remembers of both of them is not necessarily reality.
No book set in the Balkans can avoid touching on the war and its impact. While Lejla was most affected as a child, changing the spelling of her name and suffering the loss of her brother, it’s Sara who now struggles to accept the return to her home country and all that it entails. For over a decade she has not spoken the language; she ‘voluntarily abandoned [it], like one would a violent husband…’, and after speaking with Lejla on the phone she feels as if she has ‘polluted’ the clean Dublin air ‘with my language’. Bosnia, for Sara, appears as a living, breathing being trapped in the devastation of a conflict that she has spent years attempting to leave behind. When she returns, her long-overdue visit to her mother is a microcosm of her shame and disgust: hiding in the bushes of the garden, she recoils at the sight of the grotesquely fat woman in a wheelchair, and runs away rather than attempt any kind of reconciliation.
At the end of the book, after a wonderful twist, Sara is left alone, in a Viennese art gallery, in the middle of a sentence. It’s an appropriate ending for a story so deeply unsettling, so fantastically destabilising, and yet so satisfying at the same time. In exploring all the complexities and distortions of memory and identity, friendship and loss, Bastašić weaves a wondrous web that captures the reader in the best way possible.
Catch The Rabbit is published by Picador, 27th May