www.DrazanGunjaca.net

The entire literary opus of Dražan Gunjača has been published over the past two years (three novels, two plays and a collection of poems, translated into several languages, awarded numerous prizes), and this new novel, Good Night, Friends, has for me as an editor and thereby Gunjača's privileged reader, one who can follow a part of the very process of his writing, it has for me a special meaning because of its timing and its departure from the topics closely connected with the Independence War.
The novel is coming out at a time when Gunjača as a writer of fiction and plays has earned himself more than enviable recognition among literary critics, foreign rather than domestic ones, aroused and maintained a degree of interest in the conditions prevailing here that very few "professional" writers in this country can boast of. That may not be so important to note, but for the fact that Gunjača has created his highly individual literary world virtually out of nothing, except out of his ardent belief in his cause.
Now, at a time when he could relax a bit and rest on his laurels, try and exploit for some while his gained reputation or notoriety (in the latter case one can be reminded of an old Italian proverb: a fool's mother is always pregnant), he has decided to take a new challenge by leaving his earlier topics behind him and starting to dissect a group of friends, acquaintances and neighbors of about the same age, setting his new story in a small provincial town to which even God said good night.
In this dissection of himself and others belonging to that provincial environment, which never succeeds in reaching a level of what many are inclined to qualify as normal European living, he is again absolutely sincere and open-minded: he neither distorts nor embellishes it, he simply depicts is as it really is, with acute sense for those indicative details which reveal its innermost character, its absurd and listless drifting away from some fundamental human values. Good Night, Friends may hence be defined as a generation novel with a message in which the author, to quote his own words, without any hypocrisy, imperturbably, straight from the soul, portrays a backwater where nobody feels well, but which nobody even thinks of changing. It is a depressive and sad story about people who always think that things are better elsewhere, but never for a moment wonder why it is so, or if the cause may lie in them.
True to himself, Gunjača abstains from giving lessons, passing moral judgments, psychoanalyzing, philosophizing. He is simply a witness of the time and place of action, he is a chronicler, not an interpreter of events. With the sole exception that he describes them from within, as an insider, not from the outside as an omniscient narrator. This basic attitude, I would say, explains why the reader gets an impression of some incredible easiness of writing, as if the novel had been written by itself, with the writer serving as a medium only. This, too, tells quite enough about Gunjača's writing skill.
The way Gunjača builds and presents his story will certainly remind his readers of his so recognizable style: acerbic, harsh, often crude, but a moment later (black)humorous, occasionally even sentimental, expressing the whole gamut of human feelings and moods. Such a style makes his story-telling lively, wholly adapted to its setting, it gives it a rhythm the accelerations and decelerations of which actually highlight particular events and reflections.
It is very likely that the readers will find this novel as likeable as I did, and I hope that it will induce the new readers to read other Gunjača's works.

Srdja Orbanić, M.A.