In Bedbugs, both the environment and the individual are veering on the precipice of ruin. Pushing the frenetic and confessional potentials of the epistolary form, Martina Vidaić 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.
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Bedbugs by Martina Vidaić, translated from the Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursać, Sandorf Passage, 2025
The structural overview or the room-by-room discovery: these are two basic ways to describe a living space. The first gives context, while the second demands patience—and some faith, especially if the space is messy. In Bedbugs (Stenjice, 2021), Croatian writer Martina Vidaić’s second novel, some faith is needed as the story ramps up. When the reader sees that the entire book is written without a single paragraph break, they will know that it might take some focus to follow along—even with the expert translation of Ellen Elias-Bursać, who is no stranger to Croatian language and literature. But this dense journey into the winner of the 2023 European Union Prize for Literature is worth taking for the entirety of the grounded story, and even more so for the inventive, fluid metaphors and descriptive passages that carry the reader to the conclusion, even if it’s not a tidy one.
From the first line, both sardonic humor and bemusing doom abound. “I am writing to you, Hladna, my cold friend, because I happen to know you’re the only person who won’t laugh when I say that the day the ants chewed holes in my underwear, I finally had to face up to the fact that my downfall was a certainty.” The narrator’s dramatics feel a little overdone, but they still make me chuckle—and this is even before the bedbugs, which according to her Googling: “once they get into an apartment, bedbugs are extremely difficult to get rid of.” Throughout the novel that amounts to a 180-page letter, Gorana Hrabrov’s downfall may be certain, but the course always feels like somehow it could trend upward. This woman is smart and, like a bedbug, extremely difficult to get rid of; will she make it?
A car crash six months prior is the catalyst the novel turns on, but the unraveling of thirty-five-year-old Gorana began well before that. Now shaken and jobless, this up-and-coming architect—who had abruptly married a Serbian punk-rocker-turned-van-driver only to be widowed within three weeks in the aforementioned car crash—writes to the unidentified Hladna: “What I could remember of my life, perhaps even more clearly than before, was indeed my past, but it felt alien, like the way I might recall a movie or TV series.” Even after many months holed up inside her apartment, she continues to feel completely outside herself, saying: “my very name sounds alien to me.” The name Gorana indicates “mountains” while Hrabrov denotes “bravery” or “courage,” which do not quite match up with what we see—but they’re not too far off either. (Hladna the addressee, not coincidentally, means “cold.”)
Gorana is actually Dr. Hrabrov, and with a doctorate in architecture, she can scarcely encounter a built landscape without philosophizing on it. While this status offers some of her family a means for pestering her by “pushing [her] to sound superior,” when she returns to her family home, her musings on architecture usually serve to reveal how she’s feeling about other areas of her life. Vidaić and Elias-Bursać’s striking phrasing in such passages is one of the treats of the novel:
I particularly liked looking at the windows. My favorites were the old wood-framed windows, the ones with both an outside window with leaves swinging outward and an inside window with leaves swinging inward, a wide sill between them. The stodgy, cloaked air of Austro-Hungarian buildings allowed itself a flash of vulnerability with them, at once transparent and concealing. The outer window aired its vulnerability, while the inner one, half hidden behind flowers or curtains, suggested something more, and together they allowed for an openly stated truth while also questioning that same truth.
Beauty, violence, vulnerability, and a glimpse of balance. Unlike with physical, built spaces, there’s no easy way to describe one’s traumatized headspace with any similar sense of order—and perhaps that’s why it’s all the more difficult for this award-winning architect to make sense of a world collapsing on her in a city riddled with crumbling structures.
The only solid ground Vidaić offers is that the story is set in real time—August 2019 through March 2020—and in real places that may be familiar to some and easy enough for others to find on a map. She takes the opportunity to both critique and pay tribute to Zagreb’s fragile monuments as well in her architect’s musings:
At the roundabout where the street ended, there it was, waiting solemnly, well lit and white, my prize after the long trek—as you may already have guessed—the Meštrović Pavilion. There is finer architecture, finer indeed, in the city of Zagreb, but no building commands its site with greater grace, reining in even the most aggressive neoclassical building around it . . . Behind my back, and beyond the pavilion, the city center was or wasn’t, burning or not burning, while the streets ahead of me ran off for a long way in many directions.
But when she follows these roads out of Zagreb, whether with her husband or in her later flight from the bedbug-infested apartment, she is neither free nor in balance. The “horizontal free fall” she first experienced on her honeymoon continues. She is semi-estranged from her family, yet they become part of her perpetually unclear, single-minded quest, and upon reaching her hometown on the Dalmatian coast, darker feelings pervade: “While I was walking toward the center, I listened to my own footsteps as if listening to the ticking of a clock in a dark room: with an altogether mellow, almost cozy, dread.” In this mood and through conversation rife with biting undertones and explicit complaints, we learn that two years earlier, Gorana had removed the roof from their family home on “the island,” intending to replace it but neglecting to do so before returning to her own home in Zagreb. This left her dying mother practically homeless; siblings eventually moved her to their home on the mainland. “I remembered this had, indeed, happened, but I couldn’t explain my motives,” she wrote Hladna. Some may venture a more clinical diagnosis of Gorana, but I would venture that this is, at its base, the symptoms of a traumatized mindset.
While the mystery of her motives and her reflections on her disquiet drove my reading forward, it was the poetry of the passages (they cannot be called paragraphs) that truly brings about an enjoyable reading experience. The language choices go beyond words and phrases to well-crafted sentences that capture a mood or—as is foundational in this novel—a state of mind. Elias-Bursać uses a broad vocabulary that exhibits her deep understanding of the Croatian language, repeating where repetition is warranted and aligning her word choice with recognizable themes, such as that of the enduring chill: “He had blue eyes like his mother’s, but not as big, cold, or dependent on what they were reflecting, like a reflecting water surface.” I have read five of Elias-Bursać’s forty or so full-length translations, and the one time I encountered phrasing that felt out of place, she later explained to me why the precise cultural use of the word made absolute, obvious sense.
Consistent with much other Croatian literature, Vidaić’s novel calls out and works within irreconcilable contrasts: inside and outside, urban and rural, educated and less so, this government administration or the previous one. It is this or that, good or bad, architect or not architect. Nothing is black and white, clear and tidy—not architecture, marriage, nor family. Gorana is straddling a line of unreality and reality, past and future, married and not married, nature and built landscapes, and there will be no reconciliation of contradictions when the poles can never balance each other out.
Even in the simpler things, Gorana finds lack of stability: “The dish gave the impression of a perfect equilibrium. . . . But people like me, Hladna, trust only their disquiet. After a gorgeous meal like this, I thought, something catastrophic must be heading my way.”
So, after stuffing one of the only two pairs of underwear that the ants didn’t destroy into her purse, she leaves a candle burning to a stub on a piece of paper on her desk and walks out the door. Gorana can destroy the ants, but not the bedbugs, and she can only run away from herself—or can she, as March 2020 descends on a trembling Zagreb?
Ellen Sprague was named professor emerita of writing when she left Principia College in July 2025, and she is now doubling down on her own writing and editing for the first time since earning her MFA in writing (creative nonfiction and translation) from Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2013. Her writing has appeared in Emrys Journal, The Laurel Review, and Asymptote, among others; and her translations from the French have also appeared in Asymptote and The Brooklyn Rail’s InTranslation. She is a senior copy editor at Asymptote. She has conceived, proposed, and led three Principia study-abroad programs to Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia & Herzegovina between 2017 and 2022, studying “Stories from a Homeland of Shifting Borders” and focusing on language, literature, and culture.
*****
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