Posts featuring Martina Vidaić

The Powerful Motion of the Text: An Interview with Martina Vidaić and Ellen Elias-Bursać

October 16, 2025  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Ellen Sprague

[The novel's] not about the war or the post-war era, nor any of the themes that readers usually expect from the Balkans or from Croatia.

In Bedbugs, Croatian writer Martina Vidaić applies the epistolary to full-throttle effect, drawing out nearly two hundred pages of a woman’s complex and impassioned pursuit of selfhood and liberation. Through a voice that is humorously inviting, incisively driven, and utterly idiosyncratic, the novel draws from the architecture of Zagreb, the “unhappy villages” of the countryside, the omnipresent strangeness of the world and its people, and the turmoil of an intelligent, haunted mind to iterate our contemporaneity, its violence, its absurdity. Ellen Elias-Bursać’s English translation is alluring in its freneticism, all resulting in one hell of a ride.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title. 

Ellen Sprague (ES): I’m really glad that a Croatian title has come to the Asymptote Book Club. And this is not just any book for so many reasons; one of them being the fact that it won the EU Prize for Literature in 2023. I wonder if you might have anything to say about how this book came to the attention of the EU Prize and its ultimate awarding.

Martina Vidaić (MV): I wrote this book in 2021, and with the Croatian edition, there were some critics who liked it, and some others not. It didn’t have a lot of success, actually, with the Croatian awards—but I didn’t expect much because Bedbugs is a pretty unconventional book for the Croatian context.

Still, I hoped for a little bit more regarding the reception in general, and I was very, very surprised when a Croatian jury for the European Union Prize for Literature chose this book to be nominated. The prize is mostly for emerging authors—such as those who haven’t been translated much or at all. The authors don’t have to be young, but there are a number of criteria; if they’re nominating a novel, for example, then it has to be at least the author’s second novel. It’s a very nice award for young poets and writers, because it then offers the opportunity for translation. Obviously, I was very happy when I was nominated, but I really didn’t expect anything. The Prize isn’t limited to just countries in the EU—other European countries are included, forty-one in total, but divided into cycles. Every year, the cycle has thirteen or fourteen countries, and in 2023, Croatia turned out to be included, with my book ending up as the overall winner.

I was very lucky that Ellen was translator of the sample pages submitted. I think that was very important, because the jury decided based on those forty pages.

Ellen Elias-Bursać (ESB): Also, Sandorf Passage were very pleased when they were able to publish it, and the translation itself of the winning book is subsidized by the European Union, so that makes it nice for everyone. It’s a wonderful thing to be part of the whole operation.  READ MORE…

Announcing Our September Book Club Selection: Bedbugs by Martina Vidaić

September 29, 2025  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Ellen Sprague

Vidaić’s novel calls out and works within irreconcilable contrasts: inside and outside, urban and rural, educated and less so. . .

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. 

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title. 

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?   READ MORE…