Main characteristics and the Apunake theme Cugler wrote his work in Romanian,
French and
Spanish. However, Manolescu indicates, he made a point of not joining any
modernist trend. He never read Urmuz's stories, but was probably familiar with works by the rebellious
French author
Alfred Jarry and his work showed connections with Jarry's
’Pataphysics. In one of his stories, titled
Superbardul ("The Super-Bard"), Cugler mocked
Surrealism and its
automatist techniques, depicting an imaginary writer who writes nonsensical syllables on strips of paper which he glues to all sorts of objects, and which he later assembles on a silvery string. It has also been suggested that his personal style bears likeness to a variety of later works, and that it shares traits with the
Absurdist plays of
Eugène Ionesco. Comparisons have also been made between Cugler and another Absurdist playwright,
Samuel Beckett, as well as between him and pessimistic Romanian philosopher
Emil Cioran. Other writers whose work was argued to be similar with Cugler's include
Christian Morgenstern,
Lewis Carroll and
Daniil Kharms. Manolescu describes Cugler's literature as dominated by "a way of being opposed to routine, to ankylosing
academism, to casern mentality and, in general, to all of our
Pavlovian customs", while literary historian Alexandru Ruja sees his style and outlook as "the imponderability of writing, [...] the total liberty of creative attitudes", stressing that they amounted to "a different way of making literature". Cugler spoke of his own debut in literature as: "[I] started to pick on everybody." Manolescu proposed that the writer's perspective on life was "
structuralist", and that it displayed "an intelligence blessed with an enormous associative capacity in respect to the most diverse patterns, identified as if in jest." Florin Manolescu noted that these traits were present in the names he picked for his characters, objects, and the imaginary places they are to be found in, names which are often interconnected and usually puns: Kematta (from , "the summoned female"), Adu Milmor-t (from
adu-mi-l mort, "bring him to me dead"), (a common noun version of
Thermopylae, taking the form of manufacturing and commercial terminology) or Vesquenouille (a mock
Francization of
vezi că nu-i, "see that it's no longer there"). He proceeded to define such methods as "literary
pantography".
Apunake, which centered on an eponymous character, was largely an
allegory of Cugler, as he himself was to indicate in his later writings. In Manolescu's assessment, it is partly based on themes in
Greek literature, owing inspiration to its popular novels, and constitutes a Jarry-like
parody of
science fiction and technicist subjects. Alexandru Ruja notes that the story disturbs fictional conventions from the very start, by mixing in "the impression of hanging on to a reality subject to the corrosive effect of irony." The piece debuts with the words: "By the end of the trail through the Nine Thousand Bells stood a wind mill. It was there that Apunake and Kematta experienced their first moments of love. To this day one can see the walls scratched from the inside by Kematta's fingernails, and on the doorstep may still read two lines she wrote during one night of passion, more specifically two
alexandrines comprising only the syllable «Ah!»" Searching for his estranged wife, Apunake travels through space and time, and each of his journey's stations, no matter how different or far apart, coincide with the date of July 1. In one of the episodes, while visiting a forest, Apunake is turned into a rubber ball at the hands of a wizard called
Sportul ("The Sport"), which allows him to witness how an old woman is pumped up with air in order to become "a champion of free flight". Eventually reunited with his wife, the character fathers a monstrous child, who reaches enormous proportions and, in what is a reversal of
happy end conventionalism, defecates on the entire audience.
Other writings Like
Apunake, his other works constituted attacks on literary and social conventions. In his
sketch story Match nul ("Match Ending in a Draw"), Cugler depicted a
boxing competition in which four people take part, having for its referee a conferencing
hajduk, and ending in "cordiality". The series on
cookbooks (eponymously titled
Carte de bucate), sees Cugler advising on how to prepare items such as "Parisian
mountain oysters", which involves the cook singing
romanzas to the ingredients, or "Plumpy breasts" and "Tongue à la Princesse". Recipes may turn to off-topic statements, as is the case for the text recommending the "mountain oysters": "At the moment she rose from the divan and I saw her dishevelled hair reaching below her midsection, like a white silk cloak, but, whatever, why talk about it, these are things that one needs to see, not read about, I have decided, without any more doubt, in favor of short curly hair, that answers to caresses with glee and comeliness." This characteristic, Manolescu notes, was an illustration of the writer's technique as subtly outlined in the cookbooks' preface: "The hardest thing when one writes a cookbook is not to stray away from the topic. In what concerns me, I can say, without any sort of exaggeration, that, usually, I appeal more to women with fat legs than to those with slender legs. This simple detail is, I do believe, sufficient proof of my culinary intentions."
Prin Zăvoi, a prose work, is partly written as a dialog between two lovers, in which the phrase "When I receive a letter, I copy it and read the copy" is repeated several times. Other prose fragments include
Florica, which takes the shape of two telephone conversations between the author and a woman named Florica Diaconescu, who shares her strange visions, and the false biography of a non-existing poet named Haralamb Olaru. Among his poems is the Spanish-language
Dos hermanas ("Two Sisters"), about two women falling in love with the same man and deciding not to fight over him for lack of bullets, and the
assonant French-language ''Catulle, l'émule de ma mulle
("Catullus, the Emulator of My Mule"), which ends with the death of a suitcase. A Romanian-language piece, titled Cântec de leagăn'' ("Lullaby"), reads: Ruja argued that there was an intrinsic connection between Cugler's training as a musician and the pleasant sound of his lyrics. This, he proposed, was the case of pieces where "the absurd was reached" through "the alteration of regular meanings", but where the text was nonetheless arranged with intent. One of them read: ==Legacy==