Review: 'Catch the Rabbit,' by Lana Bastašic

By the beginning of 1992, the dissolution of Yugoslavia was well underway. Slovenia, Macedonia and Croatia had declared their independence, and soon Bosnia and Herzegovina would do the same. Most Americans remember the ensuing Bosnian war, if they remember it at all, for its monstrous moments, while the day-to-day costs of the nearly four-year conflict have been largely forgotten.

"Catch the Rabbit," the spectacular debut novel from the Yugoslavian-born Lana Bastašić, uses these quieter consequences of the war and its aftermath to bolster a fantastically genuine yet gently fantastical story of female friendship.

Growing up in 1980s Yugoslavia, Sara and Lejla were inseparable, but they haven't spoken in the 12 years since graduating from college. Sara, a writer and the novel's narrator, moved to Dublin, where she lives with her boyfriend and frets over trifles like her avocado tree. Lejla got married, dyed her hair white and moved to Mostar, where she works in a restaurant that caters to tourists.

When the novel opens, Lejla has called out of the blue to say that her older brother, Armin, who disappeared at the outset of the war almost 20 years earlier, is in Vienna. Sara, despite her misgivings, buys a plane ticket home.

The ensuing road trip from Mostar to Vienna allows the women to catch up and reminisce. The complexities of their friendship, from shared adolescent milestones to the day it all broke apart, are tenderly portrayed through Sara's interspersed flashbacks. The women reconnect slowly but incompletely during the drive, becoming "clumsily joined like two pieces of broken crockery, with a crack down the middle that could never be concealed."

Bastašić, who also translated the book into English, is a glorious writer, approaching even familiar emotions with a unique vibrancy, and if "Catch the Rabbit" simply followed Sara and Lejla as they drove from, say, Minneapolis to St. Louis, it would still be well worth your time.

But the novel's true brilliance lies in the many ways that the war, though rarely explicitly named, infuses and enhances every aspect of Sara's narration. When it began, she was 12 years old, and she remembers how "I would lie to foreigners later on. I was too little, I would say, I wasn't even aware of what was going on. But that's not true."

The legacy of violence is everywhere, from the tired riverside shrubs that ask, "Did someone die here? Did someone kill here?" to the light bulb "hung from the old department store building like an execution" to the women's hometown of Banja Luka, "a cold grave in the middle of our itinerary."

There is no historical hand-holding here, however, rather breadcrumbs that lead to unavoidable conclusions about Sara and Lejla's lives. And while readers unfamiliar with the war or the region may miss out on some of those insights, the main messages in this unmissable novel are clear: Ethnic violence tore apart not just a nation, but families and friends, and just because the fighting has stopped doesn't mean that peace can be easily achieved.

Cory Oldweiler is a freelance writer and editor.

Catch the Rabbit
By: Lana Bastašić.
Publisher: Restless Books, 256 pages, $18.