Uhvati zeca

There are several familiar phrases used to describe Lana Bastašić's debut novel, Catch the Rabbit. It is a story about the friendship of two young women, and it is also a story about their coming of age in a very patriarchal and conservative society during the dark nineties and the slightly less dark two thousandths. It is also a very feminist prose in which the descriptions of sex are devoid of any romance, because sexual maturation is described as the only way it could be in our society, which has suppressed its sexual energy. And it is described as a painful process of getting to know one's body that is not devoid of poetic wonder. This happens in the scene when the two main characters, Sara and Lejla, after having arranged their first sex in their lives, with irrelevant partners, go to buy a rabbit at the market in order to replace the bitterness of the painful experience with something childishly naive and beautiful. Catch the Rabbit is about all of the above, but it is primarily a novel of search realized in the form of a road novel in which the main driving force of the plot is a person who is not there. It is a story about the disappearance of people with wrong names and surnames in Banja Luka during the 1992-1995 war. It is told mercilessly and uncompromisingly, through two narrative streams, precisely and clearly. It is a shocking novel in which Lana Bastašić sovereignly rules the form she imposed on herself.