You Can’t Stay Here
Jasmina Odor
Thistledown Press
Review by Sarah Richards
Jasmina Odor’s short story collection You Can’t Stay Here is about relationships. Shaky ones. They flicker between lovers and friends, but also between old homes and new ones — most of Odor’s protagonists emigrated to Canada from Croatia during the Bosnian war. Even temporal relationships are disrupted. The war, whether lodged in one’s lived or living memory, is a wedge, “a chasm between past and future.” (119)
Odor’s complex characters, jostled by war and hardship and displacement, wear no seat belts. Readers, too, must hang on. Each story builds to a crescendo, followed by the best kind of ending: unpredictable. Just when you think a disaster has been averted, you turn the page to discover a suicide … a forbidden kiss … a dark confession. From the front lines of war to the first caress of an extramarital affair, all of the characters perch on the brink of ruin.
Trauma cuts through the heart of this collection. At times, it is defined as battle, the loss of country, or forced exile. Often, the trauma is unspoken and uncategorized — even second-hand or inherited. But in all of the stories in You Can’t Stay Here, it is a nefarious darkness — trauma as a character in itself — that overwhelms every protagonist, shuttling them to the edge of their greatest fear and then snapping them back like an elastic band, before they lose what little they have left.
Whether a refugee from a war-torn land, an ex-soldier, or simply a lost soul struggling for existential meaning, Odor’s complex protagonists bear witness to and ponder the effects of violence. Ivona in “You Can’t Stay Here” kicks out her in-laws because they are petty, rude, and disdainful of her autistic son’s limitations, even though she knows it will ruin her marriage. Amanda in “Barcelona,” observing only the hint of violence in a market one day, grows withdrawn and near catatonic. She discusses the just knowing with her boyfriend:
“At the stand. I was going to buy a print—it doesn’t matter what—they just walked by and hit her, with — a cord or something. I don’t know. It’s just that nastiness.”
“Who were—did they hurt her?”
“No—you mean was she bleeding or something? No.”
“You’re scared it could happen to you?”
“It doesn’t have to happen to me. It’s only that it’s out there, always.” (220)
Odor’s characters are suffocated by trauma and the constant threat of violence, it seems, and they can only build fragile connections to each other and the world. Toma in “The Lesser Animal,” a soldier who was complicit in the rape of two sisters caught up in front-line battle, is haunted by his inaction. Settled now in Canada, he struggles to navigate a long-term romantic relationship. The narrator writes:
Toma too wished sometimes to sleep with someone else, he thought about it a great deal even, and yes, as if it could cure him. Not that his Kate was not good enough: no, perhaps she was too good, perhaps that was what people said about them. But she was too much a part of him now, and he wished for someone unlike him and unlike Kate to come along and give him that attention peculiar to love that reinvents one. (91)
Meanwhile, the victim of the rape Toma witnessed during the war, we learn, is living in Minnesota, similarly struggling to overcome her past and experience intimacy again. Through her story, which unfolds within Toma’s story, she tells her therapist:
The mind has to accept that the body will be hurt, unpredictably, badly, permanently. No, it’s too much for the mind to accept, and it cowers in terror and impossible panic. What could be worse? Only perhaps seeing the body of one you love about to be deliberately damaged. Thus my terror over my sister; my mother’s terror. Love then seems like only that, a self outside of the self. (112)
After reading Odor’s collection, we are left, then, with a new definition of love. One that explains how the relationships can be fractured, impermanent, and unsentimental–fluid rather than solid. If feelings are entities separate from the mind, then they can, and should, be removed or hidden in times of hardship. Tying up one’s emotions and casting them aside–this is handy in times of war and violence. What becomes more difficult, as demonstrated by Odor’s characters—especially those who have escaped war and settled in Canada—is finding again normalcy after passing over the “chasm” of war. Even when the war-ravaged have secured jobs, houses, marriages–stability—how can they let down their guard long enough to let in love and all its vulnerabilities? Jasmina Odor’s collection You Can’t Stay Here explores this very question.
Sarah’s short stories, reviews, and interviews have appeared in carte blanche, The Puritan, Rusty Toque, Room Magazine, The Cardiff Review, The Danforth Review, Eclectica, Fox Adoption, and UNBUILD walls, and she has published non-fiction work with Lonely Planet and BBC.com, among others. She is an instructor at Langara College and a literacy mentor for inner-city kids in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.