by Jasmina Odor
freehand books
2024/$24.95/269 pp.
Jasmina Odor’s The Harvesters follows the wanderings—and sometimes, truly, they wander to the point of getting lost—of a Croatian–Canadian aunt and nephew on a short trip to Paris. Edmonton writer Odor, who was born in Croatia, is well known for her short stories; this is her first novel.
In The Harvesters, Paris is more much than a typical romantic setting—it’s a contemporary, multilayered Paris acting as a nexus for people from many countries. Rarely, in Paris, do protagonist Mira and her adult nephew Bernard interact with people who were born there. The most Parisian Parisian they encounter is an injured (and emblematic) pigeon that Bernard insists on trying to nurse back to health. When Mira visits the Eiffel Tower, the focus is not on the tower itself, but on the vendors selling trinkets illegally nearby.
Mira and Bernard traverse the streets of Paris to find… something. On their way to Croatia to visit Mira’s aging mother, Mira and Bernard are just stopping in Paris for a few days. Ostensibly, they are there to see sights and enjoy the city, but they each have their own ill-planned secret agenda: Mira, to find her old flame from Croatia before the war, whom she believes to be living in the city; and Bernard, to retrace the steps of his previous trip to Paris with his ex-girlfriend. Along the way they each connect with a diverse cast of minor characters born around the world. But the Paris they experience is less about love than about its flipside—heartache and longing.
In close third-person, the book is mostly told from Mira’s point of view, with some chapters focusing instead on Bernard. It’s hard to say which character is more lost. Though Mira is the only one who forgets her phone in the hotel, she is the more mature of the two and shows more self-awareness than Bernard, confronting (eventually) the true nature of her quest directly and honestly.
In her characters’ desires and failures, Odor explores themes of regret, violence and trauma. In what ways can we exist in relation to our past experiences and especially our past choices? “Blessed are the guilty,” Odor writes, in Mira’s point of view, “the regretters, the revisers, the would-have-beeners….” Mira and Bernard are both using Paris to reconnect, somehow, with their first real relationships, but what they seek is more than a person—it’s a re-evaluation of themselves and their places in a landscape of intergenerational trauma and the legacy of displacement and war.
Using setting to ground a story of psychological searching in a place—Paris—that many readers will have an instant interest in, The Harvesters will take the reader off the tourist’s map.
K.I. Press is the author of four poetry collections.
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Read more from the archive “You Can’t Stay Here” April 2018.
