Bedbugs

Description

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 the details of her life that have led her to penning this confession: from discovering bedbug bites on her hand to an ill-fated workplace romance and her estranged family on the Dalmatian coast. Not even her many professional successes have saved her from constantly feeling like a lonely outsider.

Chased be her own demons, and possible her landlord and the police, Gorana’s attempt to find closure, and connection, by retracing her steps through Zagreb and back to her hometown is delivered in a delicately braided story that introduces English-language readers to Martina Vidaić’s impressive insight into a psyche damaged not by the trauma of war, but by the intrinsic, and often isolating, difficulties of the human condition.

Martina Vidaić has published four books of poetry, including Mehanika peluda (Pollen Mechanics, 2018; Ivan Goran Kovačić Price 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 (Bed Bugs, 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). Her work has been published in many Croatian and international anthologies.

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.