Recent Memory
Lana Bastašić’s debut novel, Catch the Rabbit, opens with an arresting first-person voice—a narrator called Sara half addressing, half writing about her childhood friend Lejla, who phones her in Dublin from the Balkans after a twelve-year silence.
“You have someone and then you don’t. And that’s the whole story,” Sara writes of the friendship, though Lejla, she stresses, would contradict this. “She would say you can’t have a person. But she would be wrong. … Only she likes to think of herself as the general rule for the workings of the whole cosmos. And the truth is you can have someone, just not her. You can’t have Lejla.”
Having and not having someone is not the whole story between these friends. Theirs is a narrative with any number of beginnings, Sara tells us, and she opts to start with Lejla’s call. “Hello, you,” says the voice on the other end when Sara answers.
Standing in St. Stephen’s Green, Sara can only manage to say Lejla’s name, but Lejla rambles on as if they’ve never lost touch. In fact, she’s called to ask a favor — to insist on one. She wants Sara to pick her up in Bosnia and Herzegovina and drive her to Vienna. “I’m still in Mostar,” she remarks, as if Sara should know she ever moved there.
Rooted to her spot beside an oak, Sara adds up not just the years, but the seasons — forty-eight — since she last heard Lejla’s voice. She feels the world around her slow to a halt. “Lejla showed up, said
