Jennifer Lawn
The Girl from Sarajevo by Stef Harris (Quentin Wilson Publishing, 2025), 232pp, $35
This book is an entertaining collection made up of two novellas, both featuring spirited female protagonists who are migrants to New Zealand. The first, ‘The Girl from Sarajevo’, opens with the protagonist, Katia Botes, sunbathing naked in the backyard of her rundown flat, where she attracts the erotic attentions of her neighbour as he clandestinely peers at her through a hole in the fence. When Katia confronts him, she finds that they share a national origin: he too is originally from Sarajevo. Dragan Milošević invites Katia in for a drink to settle their differences, and they find they have other common interests. Katia loves writing but is struggling to produce any material for her creative writing course, while Dragan is a retired professor and a poet. He proposes a scheme to free Katia from her writer’s block: he will compose a novel in Croatian for her to translate as he produces it day by day, and she can then pass off the growing draft as her own work for her creative writing diploma. ‘As you will learn,’ he persuades her, ‘the more you write, the more you write.’
Unsurprisingly, given the immature and contradictory nature of her writerly ambitions, Katia is ripe to take up Dragan’s bold proposal. Katia wants to stand out from her peers by writing a brilliantly original novel, yet she also wants to blend in with Kiwi culture—hence her hope to toast herself cappuccino-brown in the sun to blend in with what she sees as a generic Kiwi complexion (even though she will never comprehend why New Zealanders put milk in their coffee). Her writing hero is the prolific author Stephen King—a self-eroding admiration as it blatantly highlights her own lack of both discipline and ideas. Her youthfulness lends her desire to be a writer an ardent intensity, yet she feels that she has experienced no grand desires worth writing about, other than running away from her family’s expectations that she will carry on the Botes fish and chip shop business in ‘Little Sarajevo’, also known as Island Bay. When Dragan reminds her that Ernest Hemingway fought in the Spanish Civil War to become a writer, she has no idea who or what he is talking about.
As Katia types late in the night, to the scent of Dragan’s cigarette smoke drifting over the fence, a heady world takes shape on the page. Called The Girl from Sarajevo, the novel that Dragan is creating tells of a wartime romance between an older man and a much younger woman. Katia translates the sex scenes particularly avidly, not shying away from the graphic terms, understanding implicitly that Dragan is choreographing exactly how he would like to make love to her.
As the plot unfolds, Harris has a lot of fun with truisms of creative writing classes, the pretentiousness of literary types and the trappings of literary celebrity. The minor male characters come off badly: there are set-piece spoofs on lecturers who extract sex in exchange for admission to courses; publishers crawling over each other to fawn on the next big thing; self-aggrandising screenplay writers for whom authors are merely expendable sketchers of a poor first draft. Absurdities pile up, and by the time we reach the point where Katia is posing naked for the publicity camera, pretending to look out the window for advancing troops, we guess that somebody is heading for a fall.
An instrumental sexual relationship is also the premise of the second novella, ‘The Other Jasmine’. Wong Ji Li arrives at Auckland International Airport exhausted and apprehensive of the situation that she is heading into: an arranged marriage to a Kiwi man, in exchange for USD$100 weekly to be sent to her family back in China. She quickly finds that her new life is going to test all of her endurance. Her sponsor is a plump, pony-tailed man-boy who is dominated by his ever-present, chain-smoking Ma. Home is a trash-filled, boarded-up farmhouse on the outskirts of town. After a perfunctory trip to the local Births, Deaths and Marriages office, Wong Ji Li officially becomes Mrs Darryl Cates—or Jasmine for short, as Ma has declared ‘Wong Ji Li’ too difficult to pronounce. The Cates pass their time sitting in front of screens, chomping on KFC, fending off the local immigration officer Quincy Goodman and, in the case of Ma, training her Sako Vixen .223 rifle on her neighbour as he ploughs his field across the fence. Gradually, Wong Ji Li comes to suspect that there has previously been another Jasmine like herself, who seems to have disappeared without a trace.
Harris’s previous creative work includes writing and directing two feature-length films, the mockumentary The Waimate Conspiracy (2006, credited as Stefen Lewis) and the crime thriller Blue Moon (2018, credited as Stefen Harris). The influence of his cinematic eye is apparent in The Girl from Sarajevo. Short chapters carry narrative tension scene by scene; interior settings in particular are precisely detailed. Dialogue is crisp, often pettily tactical in nature as characters vie for the upper hand in seesawing, gendered power dynamics. You could imagine atmospheric soundtracks, too, in keeping with a strength of Harris’s film-making: the clink of Dragan’s brandy glass and the clatter of Katia’s vintage Underwood in ‘The Girl from Sarajevo’; the buzzing of the ‘blue-arsed flies’ and the constant racket of Ma’s television in ‘The Other Jasmine’. Action scenes are practically storyboarded for the screen, especially in the physical comedy sequences of ‘The Other Jasmine’. These plot lines are congenial for mainstream cinema as well. The central characters follow a conventional arc as they travel from self-dislocation to self-authenticity, wrapping the storylines up in a satisfying, if somewhat sudden, narrative close.
The interplay of middle-aged men and young women seems to be a preoccupation of Harris’s most recent works. It is the older man’s view that predominates in Blue Moon and in the hard-boiled crime novel Double Jeopardy (2023)—works that centre on fathers who are protective toward their teenage daughters, while also failing to keep them entirely safe from the threats of predatory or unhinged men. In both tales in The Girl from Sarajevo, these largely empathetic older men morph into more sexualised figures, men who, in the throes of ‘manopause’, feel they have something to prove, especially in bed. With ‘The Girl from Sarajevo’, Dragan savours the prospect of a love affair that could well be the last of his life. With ‘The Other Jasmine’, Quincy, an ex-cop turned immigration officer, doggedly pursues Darryl and Ma for suspected abuses of immigration laws and worse—taking a not purely avuncular interest in Wong Ji Li in the process. (As a sidenote, Harris is an ex-cop, so I am not sure whether it is to be expected or, conversely, inexcusable that police work is often inept as depicted in his narratives.)
Harris’s characters inhabit a fallen world in a largely sanguine and resilient way. In these stories, nobody does anybody else a favour, or certainly not in the way that they might have thought. Relationships are patently transactional and evidently gendered: men want sex while the young heroines are well prepared to trade their bodily dignity for advancement on their own terms. Katia has no illusions about the sexual needs of men; having practised the adage ‘fake it till you make it’ in the bedroom, she finds it easy enough to translate to the creative writing classroom. Wong Ji Li, ‘nobody’s fool’, also has ulterior motives for her apparent compliance with the grotesque marriage of convenience that she enters into. These young women know how the economy of heteronormative sex works and play the system, but apparently do not let it define them—even when sex is coerced or even violent. Fraudulence and substitutability are structuring elements of the stories, albeit with inverse gender dynamics: Dragan is not just another in a series of forgettable, sexually wheedling men, and Wong Ji Li is not just another vulnerable Asian migrant woman—not just another ‘Jasmine’.
The novellas are largely successful in blending genres. ‘The Girl from Sarajevo’ melds comedy with intrigue and the ironic twists of a tale of the unexpected. Weighty issues loom, as war in Europe spills over into back-street migrant bars in the city, but Katia breezes through it all more or less insouciantly. ‘The Other Jasmine’ combines spoofy Kiwi farmhouse Gothic with fairy tale—most obviously Cinderella and Bluebeard’s Castle—and a side homage to martial arts cinema. Wong Ji Li’s entrapment, Darryl’s violence and Ma’s hidden past give a nod to serious Gothic tropes, but as in ‘The Girl from Sarajevo’, comedy overrides sincerity. More particularly, ‘The Other Jasmine’ adds to a growing strain of Kiwi Gothic narratives that frame family relationships in the mode of strangely forged kin (for comic varieties, think of Gerard Johnstone’s Housebound or Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi’s What We Do in the Shadows, or Carl Nixon’s The Tally Stick for a sinister hillbilly version). Like Katia, Wong Ji Li wears her troubles frankly and lightly, finding that her Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon warrior-inspired strategy to hone her blade through a ‘thousand gentle strokes’ is more than enough match for her Kiwi captors.
At his best, Harris is able to create and sustain mood and narrative tension, but his writing also veers towards contrivance at times. Since it is comedy, contrivance is part of the deal, but there are moments of uneven pacing and characterisation where, it seems to me, Harris drifts away from the more original and genuinely amusing elements of his writing. The secondary characters might be one area to pinpoint; I wonder what the shape of ‘The Other Jasmine’ would have been without Billy, for example, a ‘lesbian with a heart of gold’ character type who helps to wrest Wong Ji Li from the clutches of Ma (much as I enjoyed the gender play that her interventions open up). The particularities of the novella length might be another factor. Both novellas have enough material to expand into a full novel, but Harris commits himself to the single line of action and narrative pressure of the shorter form, taking some short cuts in credibility on the way. Still, I like the view of humanity that Harris presents in these stories—a world where almost everybody is grasping for something, pretty much nobody is any better than they ought to be, and good humour wins out over judgement in the end.
JENNIFER LAWN is a Learning Designer at AUT University. Her teaching and research interests encompass the postcolonial Gothic, contemporary cultural studies in Aotearoa New Zealand and representations of trauma in literature and film.
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