Jasmina Odor

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.… (mais)