Bedbugs - by Martina Vidaic (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Holed up in her Zagreb apartment, reeling from the sudden death of her husband-- whom she had married only days earlier-- Gorana sets to writing a letter uncovering everything that has happened in her life that has led her to penning this confession to her friend: from discovering bedbugs to workplace romance and familial fallouts. An architect by trade, not even her many professional successes have saved her from constantly feeling like a lonely outsider, even when it comes to her family on the coast. Gorana's attempt to find closure, and connection, is delivered in a delicately braided story that introduces English-language readers to Martina Vidaic's impressive eye for detail embodied in prose that stands apart from so much contemporary Croatian fiction in how the central trauma is not related to war, but the intrinsic, and often isolating, difficulties of the human condition.

Review Quotes

"Elias-Bursac's translation is linguistically lovely and stylistically luxurious . . . a gutsy character study of a smart woman who, midway through the journey of her life, must interrogate and process loss on multiple levels, none more destabilizing than the realization that she has perhaps entirely lost her way." --Cory Oldweiler, LA Review of Books

"Bedbugs traces the bites of bedbugs into the daily loneliness of lived experience in late capitalism." --Alina Stefanescu, Author of My Heresies

"Some novels tap into a steady momentum as different events play out. This one has a more unruly pace, taking its narrator through a series of bleak events that disrupt her comfortable life and, in some cases, turn out to have catastrophic consequences. The structure of Bedbugs might seem intimidating at first, but its relentless approach pays off in the end." --Tobias Carroll, Words Without Borders

"Pushing the frenetic and confessional potentials of the epistolary form, Martina Vidaic charts the psychological dissolution of her protagonist with the constant incursion of her disintegrating surroundings, resulting in an enthralling collision of misfortune, trauma, momentum, and one's own instinct for survival. This sense of doom, balanced with acerbic wit and paced mystery, fuels the Croatian writer's distinctive, absorbing investigation into our contemporary human conundrums of alienation and dread--but also our stubborn, headlong insistence of going onward." --Ellen Sprague, Asymptote Journal

About the Author

Ellen Elias-Bursac has been translating novels and nonfiction by Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian writers since the 1980s, including Dasa Drndic, Dubravka Ugresic, Ivana Bodrozic, and Robert Perisic. Her translation of David Albahari's novel Götz and Meyer won the National Translation Award, given by the American Literary Translators Association, in 2006. A past president of the American Literary Translators Association, she has taught at the Harvard Slavic Department and Tufts University, and spent over six years at the ex-Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague as a translator.

Martina Vidaic has published four books of poetry, including Mehanika peluda (Pollen Mechanics, 2018; Ivan Goran Kovacic Price for the best poetry book written in Croatian in two-year period). She has also published the novels Anatomija stakora (Anatomy of the Rat, 2019) and Stjenice (Bed Bugs, 2021; European Union Price for Literature), and the hybrid book Trg, trznica, noz (Square, Market, Knife, 2021; Janko Polic Kamov Award for the book of the year by Croatian Writers Society).