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EDITOR'S NOTE

Dreams have no price, says Dražan Gunjaca in the very title of his fifth novel and thus from the very start leaves the reader in two minds about the meaning of it: are dreams priceless or valueless? Having offered his readers this ambiguous reception and interpretation key, which is consistently applied as the story progresses, with full use being made of the inventory of the stylistic patterns and means already well proven and brought to extreme textual efficiency in his previous novels, Gunjaca resumes his consistent, deep reflection on what Norbert Elias terms humana conditio, human condition in its probably trickiest manifestation today, the Otherness.
However, time, place, circumstances, in which he is doing it are not suitable for a procedure like that, so it is not surprising that in Gunjaca's world of ideas the dream has asserted itself as a possibility of transcending unfavorable times, places, circumstances. It is the same dream that many have dreamt before, like the dream of Martin Luther King on the equality of all people, each and every human being: I have a dream. It is forty or so years now that in his Christian hope Luther King announced the value of lived dreams, rejecting to accept a reality unsuited, opposed to the fundamental human values. This inestimable lived dream (which, of course, has nothing to do with daydreaming) is Gunjaca's dream, a lived dream of a person who for his own sake, as well as for the sake of others, does not turn a deaf ear to the violently interrupted Luther's dream, who instead, in order to preserve his human (trans)substance, accepts the humanity of the Other. For this Other, Fellow Human Being, ought to be loved as unconditionally demanded by Saint Catherine of Siena at the very beginning of her Book of Divine Doctrine. Indeed, dreams are inestimable.
On the other hand, his dreaming before the crowd in Washington Martin Luther King soon paid with his life. In a collision with time, place, circumstances, his dream proved to be a pittance, of no value, actually life-threatening. Just as of no value turns out a dream of friendship shared by two protagonists of the new novel by Gunjaca, who always die anew after every collision with the time, places, circumstances to which they are not only unable, but also reluctant to adapt themselves, primarily because they prefer their mutual friendship and their own true self.
This is, therefore, a story of (about) two antiheroes, two maladjusted losers over whose heads continuously suspended is the sword of Damocles threatening with an imminent interruption of their shared dream. For they live in times and places where circumstances have transformed dreams into nightmares, a general horror where there is no room for nuances, refinements, subtleties. Just a faceless wasteland trying to turn to waste all things around. Gunjaca's losers fiercely resist it, the best they can, by subjecting themselves and each other to never-ending questioning, in-depth introspections, in search of those feelings and thoughts that prevent the last feeble sparkles in the immense darkness from going out. But, losers, antiheroes as they are, they are doing it by remaining true to themselves, full of irony and self-irony, waspish to each other to the point of rancor, without ill intent though. As befitting two nationally unenlightened friends, a Serb and a Croat, who adamantly refuse to get nationally enlightened, awakened, to finally become enemies.
For this intricate game played between these two dreaming antiheroes and the surrounding alas-wake reality Gunjaca has made a big turnabout in his methods of building his textual world. From his previous "fresco novel", in which the narrating hero ushers in a host of characters who then invade the novel and reduce the narrator to a kind of chronicler, Gunjaca has switched to a "dialogical" novel, where two antiheroes are always in the focus, together or separately, whereas all other characters are reduced to elements constituting a background, a setting, and only rarely rise to any prominence and only to mediate in a complicated psychological duet-duel going on all the time between the two protagonists. Such an approach to story-telling does not allow the intellectual material that the novel is made of to transform into the author's private breviary and, at the same time, prevents the story-telling from becoming an array of platitudes and commonplaces. It is therefore a continuous ride along a sharp edge, always threatening to cut off the very texture of the text, but never doing it thanks to Gunjaca's skill and unerring sense of rhythm and the right measure of the emotional and psychological exploitability of particular components. This new compositional procedure has also a considerable impact on the setting, to an extent indeed that from nearly naturalist as it was in Gunjaca's previous works it now becomes symbolic, transforming the physical space into almost magical spheres of divergent, heterodox, cultural and civilizational symbols, signs and values, into subversive undoings of a negative, destructive spirit of the time and constructive doings of a new (universally)human emotionality.
The compositional turnabout has not led to changes in style though, so this novel, too, is written in the well known Gunjaca manner, which always gives preference to the real, colloquial over the bookish language. This time and on this line Gunjaca has written the novel in the Croatian and Serb languages, thus accomplishing a typical bilingual pastiche, which brings him quite near to the contemporary experiences of the borderline literature, in both the literary and the psychiatric sense of the term.
In his search for people of good will, to whom he has dedicated this novel, Gunjaca has offered his readers precisely this: two borderline cases, who manage to translate their psychic disorders into neurotic behavior and who through their logorrhea try to find what the hyperactivity of others has lost – Logos, warning us of the fact that in a sick society healthy persons may look sick. In all jokes about madmen really mad is their surrounding, without being aware of it (unfortunately). Indeed, in such a reality dreams have no price, no matter how we construe the phrase.
Mr. Sc. Srdja Orbanic