www.DrazanGunjaca.net

About twenty years ago I spent a whole winter in Pula, walking around with a woman from Pula, Katarina was her name, making trips with her to the little towns of Pazin, Motovun, Labin; writing a book about the best of the Yugoslav literature, and – last but not least – enjoying the Istrian cuisine.
So I have not been to Pula since eighty-three. Katarina, as I have learned, married ten years ago, but not long afterwards her husband was killed in the war. My essays on the best of the Yugoslav literature are no longer of any interest to anybody from either side of the Drina river boundary, and, to be completely frank, it’s a long time now that my doctors forbade me any gastronomic enjoyments...
My present contacts with Istria, with Croatia, are strictly confined to correspondence with friends, which has never been discontinued, not even during the bombardment of Vukovar, Sarajevo or Belgrade. The letters and parcels with books delivered by my postman, who always frowns at the sight of «Croatia» or «Bosnia and Herzegovina» printed on the postal stamps, never fail to gladden me, some of them ever more than those coming from places much nearer.
On that cold October day, amidst the Belgrade Book Fair, I received a new manuscript of my friend, travel companion and fellow sufferer, Dražan Gunjača – his latest novel Good Night, Friends. At the fist glance it seemed to me that it was the fourth volume of his Balkan Farewells. I soon realized that I was wrong. The novel Good Night, Friends is in fact a sublimate of both the Farewells and two Dražan’s plays.
The hero of his latest book (whom I have no problem to identify myself with) has a way of thinking arisen from a country much bigger, much more powerful and internationally important than the tiny breakaway states in which we are now living. It’s a matter of childhood, the way of growing up, impressions, flavors, scents, the first kisses... briefly, all the infinite things we are made of. Dražan’s characters are all, without exception, deprived, crippled. Crippled by the breakup of the country in which we all lived together, by a dirty war and the not less dirty post-war, peacetime life.
Life goes on – but how? The present generation of people in their forties, whether it happens to live in Serbia, Croatia, Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina and or abroad in emigration, is really a «lost generation» - but not in that elegant, aristocratic, Parisian style in the twenties or thirties of the last century. Unfortunately not.
The theoreticians of literature have not yet found an answer to the question: after all the sufferings and misfortunes we have gone through, why has no Balkanian Hemingway, no Balkanian Miller, made himself heard... (meanwhile, recently, a Croatian or Serbian Anais Nin may have appeared – but that’s another story). The theory of literature probably should not discuss this question. Neuropsychiatry and psychology may well be more qualified to say a thing or two about it.
In terms of time and territory, the new novel by Dražan Gunjača belongs to the literature of this, conditionally called, «lost generation», but, viewed less pathetically, it may best be compared with the literature left to us in the previous century by E.M. Remarque. Peace with which «nobody was satisfied», then war which «nobody started» and which «had no winners»... then peace again... A sad, miserable, unhappy peace in the so-called «freedom and independence». Dražan’s heroes are desperately trying, using their hands and arms, nails and teeth, to get themselves out of the bog in which the march of the regional «history» has left them behind. Even when it seems to them that they are safe at last, out in the open again, allowed to resume their lives – suddenly, the age creeps. Those «best years in life» as they call them. Just as men and women are supposed to be in the prime of life, able after so many years of education, work, earning, to go on living more comfortably, Dražan’s characters (whom we all know very well and easily recognize) are forced to start anew, or to end rapidly.
Wounds, physical and mental, unhealed, stress, fears... keep surfacing. Somewhere deep inside remain their own soul, love and life they try to find and regain.
The novel Good Night, Friends makes the reader laugh, cry, reflect... While having it in his or her hands, the reader will be anything but a passive bystander. The latest Gunjača’s novel is no light reading to go through just like that to the accompaniment of light afternoon music. It is relived. The reader must also relive it.
Good Night, Friends is a book that does honor to our literature.