Friendship

Bastašić’s view of friendship — especially female friendship — is appropriately complicated in this novel. Sara and Lejla have never hated nor loved anyone as intensely as they have hated and loved each other over the years. The tension between hate and love and the vacillation phases that exist between these stations is introduced at the very beginning, when Sara writes about Lejla with resentment and bitterness: “I am the one telling the story. I can do whatever I want with her. She can’t do anything. She is three hits on a keyboard” (2). With such contempt as this, how can true friendship exist? And yet, when Lejla calls Sara out of the blue, after twelve years of silence and thousands of miles between them, Sara drops everything and goes to her. What is this, if not love?

Thus, female friendship is always more complicated, more...