The Diary of a Political Idiot:
Normal Life in Belgrade

Jasmina Tesanovic
Introduction by Tim Judah

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.

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.

Journalist TIM JUDAH has covered the wars of the former Yugoslavia for nearly ten years. From 1991 to 1995 he was based in Belgrade as a correspondent for the London Times and the Economist. During that time, he witnessed the sieges of Vukovar, Dubrovnik, and Sarajevo. He covered the Kosovo war for The New York Review of Books and other U.S. and British publications. He is the author of Kosovo: War and Revenge and The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia. He lives in London.

$14.95 Trade paper
140 pages
5.5 x 8.5
ISBN: 1-57344-114-7
Current Events / Human Rights
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