This hypnotic trigger sends Sara down the rabbit hole, and that’s it for Dublin and Michael. Absent for twelve years and living in Mostar, Lejla calls to say that Armin is alive, in Vienna. In the opening, Sara is living in Dublin with a gentle man named Michael, relatively content. To hold someone close who is both immediately familiar and possibly no longer there is what Catch the Rabbit worries over.Įach chapter has two layers: in the first half, Sara tracks events in the present, and in the second, she uses her time at the Fröhlicher Jäger to record childhood memories of Lejla. “The treetops with birds exploding out of them, the decrepit walls of Kastel, the broken branches carried away in the fast river, the smells sneaking out of the waking bakeries, the desolate streets with mutilated sidewalks-they were ours.” The most relevant literary precedent is Álvaro de Campos, whom Sara briefly mentions with the proviso that he “never existed in the first place.” Campos was one of Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa’s heteronyms, the name for a poet that Pessoa both was and was not.
“Everything existed for us and because of us,” Sara writes. That Lejla and Sara are not related by blood is a minor factual distraction-their realities are constructed with and through each other. The heart of the novel is a braiding of time and love. (She was the laureate for Bosnia and Herzegovina.) Her Sara is a ferociously satisfying narrator, and though the subject of this book has already been adduced as some kind of Ferrante friendship X-ray, that shortchanges Bastašić’s skill. She translated the book into English herself, and it won the 2020 European Union Prize for Literature. When the friends reach their destination, they post up at the Fröhlicher Jäger (Happy Hunters) hotel, a riff on the Enchanted Hunters motel from Lolita.īastašić grew up in Bosnia and lives in Belgrade now, but wrote Catch the Rabbit in Barcelona, where she cofounded a writing school called Escola Bloom.
Together, they set out across Bosnia to find Lelja’s older brother, Armin, who has been missing for years and might (just maybe) be in Vienna.
In Catch the Rabbit, the narrator, Sara, travels to meet Lejla, a long-lost friend with bleached hair. Both books are told in twelve chapters and follow an improbable chase initiated by an equally improbable white-haired creature. What happens in Lana Bastašić’s Catch the Rabbit is, per the author, modeled on Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Catch the Rabbit, by Lana Bastaši ć, Restless Books, 248 pages, $18
0 kommentar(er)
