A Life Infested with Doubt

Cory Oldweiler reviews Croatian author Martina Vidaić’s novel “Bedbugs,” newly translated by Ellen Elias-Bursać.

By Cory OldweilerSeptember 5, 2025

• Fiction

ONE OF MY favorite spots in Zagreb is Knjižara Fraktura, a bookstore operated by the independent Croatian publisher of the same name. The aesthetically contemporary space, framed by soaring walls of books and sprawling windows facing onto the street, is located just down the block from one of the city’s more conventional architectural gems in the Meštrović Pavilion, a flat-topped, cylindrical colonnade that anchors a small plaza inside a roundabout. Fraktura’s floor-to-ceiling shelves and broad display tables are stocked with Croatian-language titles, but upstairs is a small section of books translated into other languages, mostly English. Larger selections of English-language books can be found in Zagreb, but no other spot offers the well-curated collection of translated fiction from prominent Balkan authors that Fraktura does. The overwhelming majority of these novels deal in one way or another with the decade of wars associated with the breakup of Yugoslavia, and while I dearly love that genre and will rush to read anything new from several of those authors, the breadth of work on display downstairs always makes me curious what Croatian authors write about when they aren’t writing about the wars of the 1990s.

A welcome entry in this nonmartial category is award-winning poet Martina Vidaić’s second novel Stjenice (2021)—or Bedbugs, as the new English translation by Ellen Elias-Bursać is titled. Elias-Bursać is one of the premier English-language translators of Croatian fiction, having made the work of other young talents, such as Ivana Bodrožić and Damir Karakaš, as well as established giants like Daša Drndic and Dubravka Ugrešić, available to Anglophone readers. Bedbugs, which marks Vidaić’s English-language debut, is an epistolary novel consisting of a single letter from Gorana Hrabrov to a woman called Hladna, whose identity remains undisclosed for most of the book. The 35-year-old Gorana is a lauded architect who, in the wake of a car accident that killed her husband less than three weeks into their marriage, slowly sloughs off everything in her life—job, home, phone, car, possessions—until her only option is to rebuild. The struggle is almost entirely internal, but it manifests in her relationships with her landlord, co-workers, and especially family members, as she mulls over her public image, the aims of her profession, her personal values, her brief marriage, and the forgotten moments before the crash.

The letter to Hladna begins six months after the accident, in late August 2019, when Gorana is experiencing what she calls “loneliness in its most absolute form.” She and Sergej, a Serbian van driver, met at an architecture symposium earlier that year in Zagorje, on the eastern coast of the Istrian peninsula about 130 miles west of Zagreb. Their impulsive wedding on January 31 was followed by a leisurely honeymoon drive toward Belgrade, Serbia, that ended up back in Zagreb at Gorana’s apartment, where they spent a few days as husband and wife. On February 19, hours after hitting the road again to go see Gorana’s ailing mother on the Dalmatian coast, the accident occurred. Sergej died; Gorana ended up in the hospital. By August, she has already lost her job, and consequently her health insurance, and spends all her time sitting around.

As she relates to Hladna, the discovery of bedbug bites on her fingers causes her to become further unmoored, and she inadvertently locks herself out of her apartment. No car keys. No phone. Candle left burning atop a piece of paper on her desk. Instead of contacting her landlord, she plunges into the unknown. She buys an all-black outfit as if she is in mourning and gets a free makeover that leads her to remark “I don’t look like myself at all.” She becomes increasingly disillusioned with the spaces she encounters (“Everything was a performance with lousy stage sets”) and the people inhabiting them (“They don’t really see each other”). She even buys a length of rope, though finding an appropriate spot to use it proves difficult:

Cities are not well suited to a hanging. People die more decently here, in beds from overdoses and in bathtubs full of bloody water, while public parks and children’s playgrounds are not defiled; if one is throwing oneself off of high-rises or under trains, this generally happens on the outskirts of town, where the transparency of the space quickly obscures every act.

Yearning to disappear into such enveloping spaces, Gorana briefly takes comfort in the aforementioned Meštrović Pavilion, which “commands its site with greater grace” than any other building in the city. “When a person sits down on any of its steps, between any two of its columns, as I did just then, they’ll think they’re better than the life they’ve been living.” Her reprieve is ruined by a group of rowdy teenagers, however, so Gorana spends most of her remaining cash on a night bus—“is there anything worse?”—out of Zagreb. Though her destination is never identified, context clues make it clear she is headed to Zadar. (For those who like to ruminate on authorial motivations, it’s worth noting that Vidaić was born and raised in Zadar and the crash that kills Sergej takes place on her 33rd birthday.) We are introduced to a slew of Gorana’s relatives in Zadar and the surrounding area—brothers, sisters, in-laws, nieces, nephews, and her mother, who lies dying in her sister Anica’s house on the city’s waterfront. Some of Gorana’s relationships are fraught, such as the one with her brother Ivan, who accuses her of being “the demise of the family.” Others are dear, such as with her nephew Zoran, the illegitimate son of her late sister Irma, who died of breast cancer in early 2015.

Gorana grew up on an island off the coast of Zadar, which is where she last saw most of her family two years earlier. That visit ended auspiciously after she removed the roof from the family home “intending to renovate it,” then returned to Zagreb before moving forward with the project. Bedbugs is teeming with contrasts between Gorana, who found success in the cosmopolitan capital city, and her relatives, who remained behind in Dalmatia. (Zadar itself is far from a sleepy little town, but it has just 10 percent of Zagreb’s population.) These experiential differences are highlighted in her nephew Jere’s pride in cooking quinoa—“as if I had arrived after spending thirty-five years on an island in isolation and had never heard of this miracle food,” Gorana says—and her brother-in-law Jakovčević’s conspiracy theories about “[George] Soros’s secret plots.”

The regional distinction is also a burden that Gorana’s mother, Milka, has borne her entire life, though in a slightly different iteration. Milka is from Zadar and carried the “permanent shame” of being “a teenage girl from the mainland [who married] an only child from the islands.” The opposition of island and mainland is apparent to Gorana as well, even professionally. While she and her fellow architects seek to craft urban spaces, islands are almost impregnable to such manipulation: “Though an island can also be shaped, arranged, and devastated, interventions into it are less serious, sometimes even ridiculous, because nothing can truly touch its finality. An island is about forgetting the future.”

While Gorana was “knocked low by tragedy,” it becomes clear that her malaise is not entirely—or perhaps even primarily—due to grief but rather a result of events that have accumulated throughout her life. She describes herself as having “the tenacity of a child who was a grown-up even before she was born” and as someone who has always felt unwanted because her mother “perceived [her] as a blunder that should never have happened, disgraceful proof of late-in-life passion.” Even the car crash is more of a culmination than an instigation, the honeymoon drive “a sort of horizontal free fall” that occurred from “a very great height.”

Elias-Bursać’s translation is linguistically lovely and stylistically luxurious, qualities on display as Gorana appraises the young woman administering her department store makeover: “She was expressionless, mildly invidious in her manner, not at all nervous, and slow, really, but a glance at her eyebrows, symmetrically drawn like swallows’ wings in a children’s drawing, filled me with dread.” The novel can be darkly humorous at times, such as when Gorana realizes that ants have infested her laundry bag: “By any means necessary, I needed to defend my remaining panties.” And Elias-Bursać excels at the intangibles that make for a standout translation. She gets the slang terms exactly right when Dragan, Anica’s husband, is talking about their son Ante: “It never bothered me that he was a homo, but he shouldn’t be behaving like a little fag.” Despite its insensitivity, Dragan intends the use of “homo” to be understanding, but he can’t even keep up the charade until the end of the sentence. And later, when Gorana speaks in dialect while laying into her brother, Elias-Bursać tweaks her translation accordingly, having Gorana recall learning of their father’s death by hearing people tell her, “Yer poppa, he succumbed.”

Character names often carry connotations. An island woman who was once in love with Gorana’s brother but now evinces complete control of her life is named Zvijezda, which means star. And Gorana Hrabrov evokes both “gora,” which means mountain, and “hrabro,” meaning brave or courageous. But no name is more critical than that of Hladna, the mysterious woman to whom Gorana is writing. The name means cold, or cold one, and while the meaning would not have needed to be highlighted in the original Croatian version, Elias-Bursać makes sure that English readers are aware of the meaning by opening the novel with “I’m writing to you, Hladna, my cold friend …”

Emotional coldness and physical cold recur throughout the novel, emphasizing Gorana’s feelings of alienation from everything and everyone around her. The sensation is particularly prominent during a seminal event that she witnessed at age 15: “All I felt was a terrible, cold lightness about it. Early on, I saw freedom is cold. So, so cold. Cold like a cold room that not a single laugh can warm.” What she sees involves her nephew Jere, and it helps to explain not only their antagonistic relationship but also Gorana’s belief that freedom requires total commitment. Jere was incapable of such devotion: “He didn’t have the daring to abandon himself, a daring which, I now know, is the first prerequisite for freedom.” Gorana has no such qualms, striving to achieve freedom at any cost by embracing sacrifice and solitude as she abandons the world around her and anyone close to her. She panicked after only a couple of days cohabitating with her husband: “The fact that I was no longer in charge of my own space filled me with distress.” And her former co-worker Igor, the one person who sees Gorana the way she wants to be perceived, becomes a casualty too, getting pushed away after the car crash when she cannot “bear the thought of strangers setting foot in [her] history.”

Vidaić drops a couple of narrative bombshells near the conclusion of Bedbugs, revelations that go a long way toward explaining Gorana’s motivations but don’t do her the disservice of providing pat answers for the suffering we have watched her endure. Instead, they simply allow her to ask the right questions of herself. It’s a smart, gutsy way to conclude 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: “How is it possible […] that I, who had always worked with care, had left such disorder behind?” Nobody wants the inconvenience of starting over once they sense that their entire life is infested with doubt and uncertainty, but Bedbugs suggests that sometimes starting over is the only way to move forward.