DANIEL DRĂGAN
REVIEWALS (EXCERPTS)
One of the exigencies of realism is to present life and the truth of life. No author seems to have dared so far to deal with reality as it really is. That is a great challenge for a writer and Daniel Dragan has understood it. An author can successfully return to reality, to a new kind of realism which mingles topic and reflection in presenting life free of slogans, patterns, censorship and even art carelessly. This comprehensive image of The Ocean is the key of a structure which gives the writer the possibility of dealing without any prejudice with the problems of our age seen as an indefinite reality but at the same time a very precise one. And I cannot find now an author to have dared so much. Not even among our famous ones.
Marian Popa (1980)
Five pages describe life more mercilessly than an entire social novel does. A virulent summary, self-exploding and devasting. The Red Beads bursts into such a violence, failure and pain like a blow into eyes, skillfully given, shamelessly as if belonging to a professional reporter, hurried and amused at the same time when perceiving the elements of a world dark, contradictory and tragic.
N. Steinhardt (1984)
The sketches and the short stories in Daniel Dragan's volume The Red Beads sound a particular tonality which unifies them, giving the whole collection homogenity of style and attitude: the tone of a recording apparently neutral, but in itself of a most unsatiable perception of minute details. The shorter texts become this way sarcastic through the use of indirect style: very precise situations generating the truth at moral and psychological level, refined perceptions of conflicting moods, moments of intensive living capable of revealing particular moral traits.
Mircea Iorgulescu (1989)
None of Daniel Dragan's works so far has shown more imagination, care for writing, and artistic scrupulosity than The Great Bear, a realistic novel and an allegorical one in a suggestive interference of levels. Simeon's apprehension of the imaginary crosses periodically Radu's devotion to precise realism. The two heroes are likely to be projections of the writer himself, symbolically summarizing the 'poetic principle' of the writer's new literary direction.
Laurentiu Ulici (1989)
Daniel Dragan feels at ease when experiencing a variety of artistic ways which reveal a proteic sensibility specific to his mature talent and creativity. His prose is rooted in the solid ground of traditional realism. Minute analysis and psychological investigation squeeze into realm of concrete reality and direct correspondence. The interference of the fantastic elements occurs most naturally out of an urgent need to endow the artistic universe with a new dimension.
Viorica Mircea (1989)
In Hard as Stone (it's a mistery how the novel escaped censorship) the author reveals with the ability of a sociologist the impotence of a system, the communist one, to give structure to the reality. The system had to disappear spontaneously with Maria Suru, because the next generation relied on other coordinates. But in The Masters of the World, the writer does more than simply denying a system. He attacks the system in his intimacy, its ridiculous pride to pretend to be the expression of the world itself - Atlas with earth on his shoulders, if we deprive him of positive mythic symbolism and consider him only as the embodiment of a blind force. We would search in vain in the previous novels of Daniel Dragan such symbolism of dehumanized typology which only a narrative technique full of stylistic resources can make it bearable (and even more than that as we shall see).
Mona Mamulea (1999)
Daniel Dragan has definitely and profoundly marked the evolution of Romanian literature in the last few decades through his activity in the field of poetry, prose, journalism and publication. He is always present in the consciousness of a public of various aesthetic preferences as an active organizer of the literary life and mainly as an enthusiastic confident in the power of the word to turn life better. Numerous writers o previous generations belonging to a variety of artistic directions have been positively influenced by the entire devotion of Daniel Dragan to the values which unify us all. The Dying Moment proves his extraordinary literary evolution showing that living under the moral rules of the Romainas is the essence and the truth of living. We find in his book a reflexive poetry, inspired by the great questions of mankind, a sense of goodness which overwhelmes us from the very beginning, a religious atitude full of shyness and respect for the myteries o existence. It is a poetry rich in reflexion and metaphysics achieved through a subtle metamorphosis of reality and through successive symbols of the sacred capable to catalyze in us the loftiest aspirations. The poets and the litarary theorists of the conceptive lyrics - Die Gedanken Lyrik - could be satisfied with the way Daniel Dragan understands to illustrate today their high and severe aesthetic exigencies.
Mihail Diaconescu (1999)
The mystical speech Clipa de apoi is a rare example of religious poetry, in which the pious ardour is assumed both solemnly and intimately. We find herewith the full confession of faith and the supreme daring of a new and sincere vision. Daniil Dragan retired in the world in order to reach God.
Niadi Cernica (2000)
Daniel Dragan is the first contemporary Romanian poet to lyrically investigate into the shallow strata of the American space in search for his profound spirit.
Continentul Whitman represents, in my opinion, an accomplishment of aesthetics in today's Romanian poetry through the gravity of the tone and the profoundness of the lyrical message, capable to unite, figuratively speaking, the continents to each other, in front of the barbarousness besieging the bounds of the human civilization and the faith in God.
M.N. Rusu (2002)
Parintele Thom is a complex novel, in which, with a devastating pleasure to narrate, great polyphonic architectures are being structured. And through its grandiose symbolism-a symbolic novel, therefore a remarkable meditation upon this world and its planetary destiny, concentrated into a vast engram of time. A poisoned historic time, that the native people experienced as a form of terror.
Ion Itu (2003)
An archaic and undoubtedly Christian message, which shapes symbolically into the significant image of the grain of wheat which dies in order to bring about rich crop. The recovered time is thus also a reliving that follows oblivion or death, and this for a return to normality; if not merely a sacred time, in a time overrun by sacred. All throughout, Parintele Thom is a novel that says more than its letter, pertaining exactly to this dream of renewal, of regeneration, of a regained dignity.
Dorin Stefanescu (2003)
The novel Parintele Thom by Mr. Daniel Dragan is, I believe, already a European novel, because by tackling a matter that we lived and continue to bitterly live - the disappearance of an ethnic Transylvanian community that we have been bound to - we can foresee in it the birth of a new community, this time at a continental level, a European spirit, beyond the errors and the horrors of history.
Marius Iosif (2003)
Daniel Dragan has repeatedly proven to be an excellent connoisseur of the feminine universe. Hereby he suggests a less approached one, and thus a novelty in the Romanian literature. However hateful Maria Suru may seem as a real person, had she ever existed, Daniel Dragan's writing succeeds in having us like her as a character.
*
A splendid satirical monograph of Romania today and tomorrow is Daniel Dragans latest novel, Ciuma boilor. The author does away with any idyllic version concerning "the Romanian soul", presenting it in its supreme absurdity. Never have I read a more cynical, more lashing prose, written by a Romanian about the Romanians. The whole Romania is reduced to a village in which garrulousness and envy are taken to their extreme manifestation: institutionalized crime.
Mircea Ardeleanu (2004)
Daniel Dragan displays here the macabre vision of a community in which the saying Let the neighbour's goat perish becomes the measure of all things. In sharp and harsh words, yet with a good sense of humour, the novel is telling stories about the aboriginal 'national character' without employing euphemisms. Well written, fluent and thrilling, Ciuma boilor could be also considered under an ethno-pathological viewpoint.
Mona Mamulea (2004)