Jasmina Odor

The Harvesters, Jasmina Odor’s luminous debut novel, depicts Mira and her nephew Bernard’s brief visit to Paris through Mira’s inquiring, meditative perspective. Mira and Bernard are both suffering the effects of recent losses. In her forties, childless and recently divorced from David, Mira’s past is very much on her mind. The purpose of the journey is to visit Mira’s mother—Bernard’s grandmother—in Croatia, which Mira fled during the war, eventually settling in Canada. Mira’s father has died, and her mother recently suffered a stroke, so Mira’s level of concern is elevated. The 3-night Paris stopover was Bernard’s idea, a chance for him to revisit the site of a trip he took the previous year with girlfriend Aisha while he broods over their subsequent breakup and his role in what happened. But Mira also has a hidden motive: visiting Paris gives her a chance to perhaps reconnect with Mirko, a boyfriend from the years prior to her marriage, with whom she lost contact but has now tracked down via the internet. Mira has a high opinion of her nephew and regards him as a gentle and painfully self-aware young man whose heart is easily broken. Indeed, their initial foray into the Paris streets hits a detour when they come across an injured pigeon, which Bernard insists they must bring to the hotel and nurse back to health. To Mira, Bernard seems to be at a loose end, undecided about his future and still wistfully in love with Aisha (constantly checking his phone to see if his ex is responding to his texts). But Mira is also perplexed by Bernard’s behaviour, when he seeks an intimate connection with every young woman he meets, including a hotel maid and Alice, the daughter of an American family staying at the same hotel. For her own part, Mira seems stuck in the hollow space between her new and old lives, puzzling over a divorce she’s not sure she even wanted, wondering where David is and what he’s doing, and distracted by concerns regarding her mother’s health and welfare. With limpid, arresting prose, Jasmina Odor captures the restlessness of two characters nostalgic for a safe, settled past, wanting more but wary of moving forward into a future that holds so many unknowns. Like her previous book, the brilliant story collection You Can’t Stay Here (2017), this is a sophisticated, moving and psychologically probing work brimming with insightful observations on loss, transition, and the thorny—sometimes baffling—intricacies of the human heart. With The Harvesters, her first novel, Jasmina Odor proves herself to be a writer of the first order whose fiction is worth seeking out and is sure to reward repeated readings.… (mehr)

Movement and change are core to Jasmina Odor’s first collection of short fiction. Her characters are edgy and dissatisfied with their lot in life, always searching and questioning, challenging the limits that their circumstances have imposed. Even when their lives seem fine, they spend their days looking for a way to step out of the present and into some new way of being. Often though, things are not fine. The tragic backdrop for some of the stories in You Can’t Stay Here is war, specifically the brutal and prolonged civil war that split the former Yugoslavia into a smattering of smaller states. Odor emigrated to Canada in the early 1990s and she brings a profound sensitivity to the forces that compel people to seek refuge from dangers seen and unseen, and to what it means to have your life divided into “before” and “after,” to her short fiction. But, beyond all this, her stories are compellingly multi-faceted, layering personal complications on emotional complexities, building psychologically intricate and elaborately detailed worlds for her characters to inhabit. In the opening story, “A Board of Perfect Pine,” Josh and Nina brave a winter storm to attend a party at Josh’s parents’ home, where Nina drinks too much and misbehaves embarrassingly with an older man for reasons that she can’t explain other than to say that some part of her is “curious and yearning and unapologetic.” In “The Time of the Apricots” Juliet’s novel has been made into a film and she has attended the premier. The story is narrated by her boyfriend Alek, a Croatian refugee, who spends much of the story trying to decipher her puzzling behaviour and figure out why she is so unhappy when everything seems to be working in her favour. And in the title story Ivona and Sven, Croatian refugees living in Canada, have laboured to bring Sven’s parents over for a visit. But Ivona, dealing with a boss at work who is attracted to her, a young son with autism, and deepening feelings of restlessness and foreboding, cannot abide their criticisms and, knowing that she’s putting her marriage at risk, tells them they have to leave. For many of her people love is an impossible mystery, causing only pain. Odor’s writing is lush and full-blooded, filled with arresting phrases and telling observations on the numerous subtle ways that people confound and cause damage to each other. These are wise and poignant but never sentimental stories that grow more fascinating with repeated readings. A stellar debut.… (mehr)