Bedbugs
Holed up in her Zagreb apartment, reeling from the sudden death of her husband—whom she had married only days earlier—architect Gorana Hrabrov sets to writing a letter to her friend, uncovering everything that has happened in her life that has led her to penning this confession: from discovering bedbug bites on her hand to workplace romance and familial fallouts. 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 Vidaić’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."Elias-Bursać’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"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 BordersMartina Vidaić has published four books of poetry, including Mehanika peluda (Pollen Mechanics, 2018; Ivan Goran Kovačić Prize for the best poetry book written in Croatian in two-year period). She has also published the novels Anatomija štakora (Anatomy of the Rat, 2019) and Stjenice (Bedbugs, 2021; European Union Prize for Literature), and the hybrid book Trg, tržnica, nož (Square, Market, Knife, 2021; Janko Polić Kamov Award for the book of the year by Croatian Writers Society).Ellen Elias-Bursać has been translating novels and nonfiction by Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian writers since the 1980s, including Daša Drndić, Dubravka Ugrešić, Ivana Bodrožić, and Robert Perišić. 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.
