The Diary of a Political Idiot: Normal Life in Belgrade

Aleksandar Hemon, Village Voice Literary Supplement, October-November 2000
"In recent years, many books on the Yugoslav wars have been written. None of them had the powerful immediacy of Tesanovic's Diary …A remarkable book ."

Book Description
The Diary of a Political Idiot is a woman writer’s story of life in Belgrade under NATO bombing. Labeled a traitor by nationalist Serbs because she opposes the war in Kosovo, Jasmina Tesanovic records the intimate details of ordinary life under extraordinary circumstances. Tesanovic’s Diary is remarkable because it chronicles recent history from an insider’s point of view rarely heard out of Milosevic’s Yugoslavia. As Tim Judah writes in his introduction, The Diary of a Political Idiot "shows us how ‘they’ could be ‘us’; what it feels like, what it is like to be trapped in a country isolated by its regime, where completely ordinary people pay for the crimes of their leaders." How Tesanovic’s diary entries found their way into print is a story of its own. Hours after NATO started bombing Yugoslavia, Jasmina Tesanovic received an e-mail from a friend in Sweden, who wanted to know how she was doing. Jasmina didn’t have time to write back, so she sent entries from her diary. Her friend, the writer Ana Valdes, posted Jasmina’s diary entries on the web site of a magazine she wrote for. Within a week, the diaries had been posted anonymously on fifty web sites, translated into several languages, and sent in emails throughout the world. Jasmina knew nothing of this. When a friend in London sent Jasmina an excerpt from the diary, she read a few paragraphs and thought, This woman writes exactly like me. Nevertheless, Tesanovic did not believe she was reading her own diary until her friend traced the e-mail from Sweden to Holland to Croatia and back to Jasmina. Someone had removed Jasmina’s name to protect her. The diary of an anonymous woman from Belgrade had become everybody’s diary. The Diary of a Political Idiot was chosen to represent the work of Serbian writers on the PEN Trans European Writer’s train. The Diary has now been translated into eleven languages. It first appeared in English in Granta (Issue 67) in 1999. A ruthless reviewer from Belgrade called The Diary of a Political Idiot "a book of the marginal for the marginal…the best book written this year, but it never will be mainstream in Serbia." Midnight Editions was created to preserve just such "marginal" voices which, as Tim Judah writes, are often lost "because of the enormity of crimes committed in their names." Jasmina’s Diary never made the news, the wire services, the major TV networks, or mainstream magazines, but it has found its way into the hands of astute editors and readers around the globe. At a time when "compassion fatigue" is seen as both the cause and the unavoidable consequence of current international news reporting, we believe that Jasmina Tesanovic’s wide readership is as much a testimony to the intelligence and compassion of her readers as it is to her own.

From the Publisher
Shows us how ‘they’ could be ‘us’; what it feels like, what it is like to be trapped in a country isolated by its regime, where completely ordinary people pay for the crimes of their leaders."—Tim Judah, author of KOSOVO: WAR AND REVENGE

From the Inside Flap
"This is a thoughtful and courageous book. As NATO bombs rain overhead and Yugoslav anti-aircraft guns flash through the night sky over Belgrade, Jasmina Tesanovic opens her diary and records what it is like to live in a city under siege. Day after day, she takes to the streets in search of her own moral compass, passing by terrified neighbors huddling in basements and mobs of vandals roaming through the city, destroying Western buildings. Ambiguous about Clinton's "humanitarian war," but vehemently opposed to Milosevic's carnage in Kosovo, she asks: "Which cross should I bear? NATO bombs or Serb Killings?" Her answer provides a rare glimpse into the mindset of ordinary Serbs who, because of their isolation and indifference, are paying dearly for the crimes of a tyrant." —Eric Stover, Human Rights Center, University of California, Berkeley, Author of THE GRAVES: SREBRENICA AND VUKOVAR

About the Author
Jasmina Tesanovic is a writer, editor, translator, publisher, and filmmaker. Her writing in English has been published in Granta and The Guardian (U.K.). She is co-editor of The Suitcase: Refugee Voices from Bosnia and Croatia. She is a founding editor of 94, the first feminist publisher in Serbia. Her film based on The Diary of a Political Idiot was screened at the 56th International Venice Film Festival in 1999. Jasmina Tesanovic lives in Belgrade.


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When NATO forces bombarded Serbia in 1999, many questioned the necessity of such an action, but few wondered how ordinary Serbian citizens withstood those 78 days of systematic shelling. Here's an account by an opponent of Milosevic's 13-year iron rule that attempts to convey the nonnationalist viewpoint of the rarely heard Serbian intelligentsia, whose silence has hitherto been successfully sustained by Serbia's autocratic politics. In this first book in the Midnight Editions imprint, Tesanovic, a noted writer and translator, asks the same "why" that the 11-year-old Zlata Filipovic asked in her own diarylike narrative of the siege of Sarajevo (Zlata's Diary, LJ 4/15/94). But Filipovic's childlike questioning of the absurdity of Bosnia's civil war was justified, as was her inability to comprehend her homeland's multiethnic identities. In contrast, Tesanovic claims to be an intellectual who is painfully aware of the atrocities that her country's leaders committed against Zlata's homeland and other Balkan nations. Yet she comes off as a passive intellectual who merely asks the "why" rather than a responsible adult who also attempts to understand the "how." Such knowledge is hard to reconcile with her supposed political innocence and only reinforces one's sense of the inertia that had already existed among Serbian intellectuals during the Serbian wars with Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo. Although compelling to read, this insider account (already translated into 11 languages) only superficially tackles the far-from-superficial Serbian crisis. An optional purchase.--Natasa Musa, New York Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.


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