Catch the Rabbit by Lana Bastašić

I’m continuing my read through winners of the European Union Prize for Literature (as ever, a video at the bottom explaining the prize), which has been a really interesting and varied experience even after only three books. Catch the Rabbit is one of the most recent winners – from 2020, by Bosnian author Lana Bastašić, who also translated it into English.

Sara is the narrator of the novel. She grew up in what was then Yugoslavia, and now lives in Dublin with her boyfriend Michael. In many ways, she has put that world behind her – fully immersed in an entirely different world, and without many connections to the country she left behind, but which is deep in her bones. The conflict, the tension that led to it, and its aftermath have all helped form who she is. And nobody has helped form her more than Lejla, the childhood best friend who hasn’t spoken to her in twelve years.

Until, out of the blue, Lejla calls and tells her to come to Bosnia. Because she thinks that her brother, Armin, is alive and living in Vienna. Armin hasn’t been heard of since he disappeared twenty years earlier, as the Bosnian War began. Despite some misgivings, Sara gets on a plane. Not least because she was once in love with Armin herself.

Armin’s possible reappearance might be the catalyst for the novel, but the real story of Catch the Rabbit is the friendship between Sara and Lejla. The novel jumps between present and future, and in both time periods it is a volatile and unpredictable friendship. Lejla – or Lela, as she rechristened herself after the war – is herself volatile and unpredictable. She shows no gratitude at Sara answering her unexpected cry, nor even much emotion at their reunion. Rather, she jumps straight back into the hold she has over Sara – perhaps not an intentionally malevolent one, but with the power of the more forceful personality. And Bastašić writes with extraordinary precision and insight into the detailed depths of an intense friendship.

Obsessive. One of her words. Back then, before college started, when I thought I was pregnant. ‘Don’t be obsessive, Sara.’ We’re sitting in some kafana toilet, waiting for the sign to appear on the stick. No, before that, before the stick, when we were studying for the chemistry test. I was angry because she couldn’t sit still and study. ‘Don’t be obsessive,’ she told me. Or perhaps even before, much before? Perhaps to her I had always been obsessive. And then I moved to Dublin, met Michael, and started speaking her language. ‘Don’t be obsessive,’ I’d tell him without blinking, at the same time feeling as if I had stolen something, something I didn’t think I needed. I had brought pieces of Lejla on me, tiny insects that had crawled into my bag, my pockets, under my pants, and yet they would hide their real nature before Michael. Our first date: an Icelandic movie we both pretended to have understood. ‘So what, you’re like an artist or something?’ I asked. I twisted my foot on the sidewalk and looked at him condescendingly. And he loved it, the Lejla in me, though her never met her. She got to have him, too.

There is a richness and beauty to Bastašić’s writing that doesn’t ever let the reader settle. Everything in the novel is set in the real world, but something in the way it was written always made me feel like it was on the precipice of magical realism. Perhaps it is the constant uncertainty – what is the importance of the rabbit they buried; what happened on the island that damaged their friendship so severely; where is Armin and why haven’t they heard from him for so long.

And, of course, the author was also the translator – and seems equally skilled at that. A good translation is one you don’t notice, and so I assume Bastašić’s was very good. The only awkward scene is where one character is speaking in Bosnian and the other in English – I assume in the original version, these were indeed in two languages. It doesn’t quite work when everything is in English!

Bastašić does seem to anticipate a little more knowledge about the history of the area than I have. This passage, for instance, I really liked – but, if I’m honest, I don’t know what happened in or before the Bosnian War except in the broadest of outlines. I was only 6 or 7 when it started, so perhaps readers a bit older than me – and certainly readers in Bosnia – will know and understand all the hinted-at bits that aren’t quite mentioned.

The dark spread around as if some mean kid had spilled it over us. Townspeople suddenly got new faces. Some had frowned just once and stayed that way forever. Others were gone for good, left without much noise. 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. We knew, you and I. We knew it had started, that they had started it. We knew it would last. Soon it was a constant, like an extra chemical element in the air. It was easy to say its name, roll it over the tongue like good morning or good night. It was everywhere: in the linden tree behind the school, in kids’ drawing in the school toilet, in the teachers who suddenly used the Cyrillic alphabet only. It was in you, in your new name, merged with Armin’s disappearance.

But factual history is only the backdrop for the unsettling revival of this friendship – disconcerting and joyful to Sara at the same time, thrown back into a world she has left behind with hardly any acknowledgement from Lejla that the reunion is anything out of the ordinary. This dissection of friendship is the novel I was hoping My Brilliant Friend would be. In my opinion, Catch the Rabbit is much the better book.

Thankfully it has been many years since I had a friendship this unpredictable and liable to damage – not since high school – but Bastašić expertly conveys what it feels like to be in the midst of it. All the more unsettling as any adult – and too complex to be dismissed as a bad friendship, because there is also so much richness and depth there. It’s such a nuanced portrait.

As the ending comes near, the reading experience starts to feel more and more unhinged – perhaps, as the cover quote suggests, like two Alices in Wonderland. It’s a tour de force and will stay with me.