Love at first page

Catch the Rabbit
Lana Bastašić

I knew from the very first page that I was going to like this book a lot. From the start, it exhibits a self-consciousness that I very much enjoy. In her opening paragraph, the narrator declares “Except you would say you can’t have a person. Or should I say she? Perhaps that’s better, you’d like that. To be a she in a book. All right, then”. When done well, this kind of playing around with pronouns makes me smile; I like the slightly vertiginous effect created when a book steps confidently out of its own frame. And this book certainly does that confidently and well.

These sentences contained another hint that this would be my kind of book: the narrator’s use of direct address, and her indecision between second- and third-person narration, allude towards a complicated female relationship. This is further solidified when the narrator announces, towards the bottom of the page, “If she could, she would sneak between two sentences like a moth between two slats of a venetian blind, and would finish my story off from the inside”. A complicated female relationship and some quirky imagery! The first page couldn’t have ticked more of my boxes if it had tried. Fortunately, the rest of the book didn’t disappoint. It tells the story of two adult women, friends in adolescence but now distant, suddenly reunited to take a road trip from Mostar to Vienna. The story of their journey is interspersed with chapters narrating their teenage friendship. In both the past and the present their relationship is awkward and prickly. The narrator, Sara, despairs of her difficult companion, Lejla. Lejla certainly seems to be hard work. However, as the narrative progresses we increasingly question Sara’s reliability and wonder whether the faultlines in this relationship go both ways, immersing us in a fascinating, darkly comic, tale of the complexities of friendship, the impact of history and the limitations of memory.