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The Cellist of Sarajevo Steven Galloway Books

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The Cellist of Sarajevo Steven Galloway Books

I read this book upon the recommendation of a musician friend, a string player, after reading several reviews by friends here on Amazon.

"The Cellist of Sarajevo" is a short first novel by Steven Galloway, a teacher of creative writing at the University of British Columbia. Set during the siege of Sarajevo during the 1990s, the book explores how people work to retain hope and meaning during a terrible and immediate war. The book is based upon a historical incident in which, following an explosion that killed 22 people, a cellist from Sarajevo played, at the site of the explosion, a piece called "Albinoni's Adagio" for 22 consecutive days to commemorate the loss of the 22 lives.

The book includes four primary characters, including the cellist. The book suffers from this diffusion of interest. The strongest character in the book is not the cellist but rather a 28-year old woman with the pseudonym of Arrow. Possessing extraordinary gifts with a rifle, Arrow becomes a reluctant sniper in the defense of Saravejo following the outbreak of the conflict. She is ambivalent, at the least, about her role as a killer and endeavors to limit her targets to armed soldiers and not to civilians. Arrow is given the mission of protecting the cellist from attack by snipers during his daily playing in commemoration of the 22 dead.

The other two major characters are Kenan, middle-aged with a wife and daughter, who makes a hazardous journey twice each week to secure water for his family and for a querulous aged neighbor and Dragan, 64. Dragan is a bakery worker, an essential occoupation which exempts him from military service. He lives uneasily with his in-laws after his wife and son have secured their escape to Italy. The alternating chapters of the book move back and forth among the four characters and their efforts to preserve something of themseleves amidst the daily shelling of the city.

With the cellist, the book explores music as a civilizing, enabling force which helps people, friend and enemy alike, carry on. Galloway does not show the reader much of the cellist in the book as the novel explores more the reactions of people to the cellist rather than the feelings of the cellist himself. Arrow is the most complex character in the story as she must learn to come to an understanding of what she has become and its limitations. The remaining two characters, Kenan and Dragan, tend not to be distinctly drawn.

The book intersperses descriptions of Saravejo, past and present, with the violence of the war to give an indication of what civilized community life might be. Each of the characters comes to a realization that human life is infinitely valuable in its mortality. Galloway writes in a spare, muffled style. I was vaguely dissatisfied with the way the story developed. The book doesn't have much backbone. It speaks in a quiet voice in which characters and events meld together. More focus and stronger organization would have been welcome. I am still grateful to my friend for recommending this book. It reminded me of the many things that make life precious.

Robin Friedman


Tags : Amazon.com: The Cellist of Sarajevo (9781594489860): Steven Galloway: Books,Steven Galloway,The Cellist of Sarajevo,Riverhead Hardcover,1594489866,Cellists;Fiction.,Sarajevo (Bosnia and Herzegovina);Fiction.,Yugoslav War, 1991-1995;Fiction.,Cellists,English Canadian Novel And Short Story,Fiction,Fiction - General,Fiction Literary,Literary,Snipers,Yugoslav War, 1991-1995

The Cellist of Sarajevo Steven Galloway Books Reviews

I pretty much loved this book. Taking place during the Bosnian/Serbian conflict, it tells of primarily civilian life in a Sarajevo under siege. The people on whom the book centers lead sad, grim, terrified, and ultimately--at least for these characters--life-affirming lives amid the chaos. To begin with, these lives are limited and pretty tedious, circumscribed by the so difficult-to-achieve needs of daily life and the shells that fall around them and the snipers who shoot from the hills about Sarajevo almost randomly, picking off people trying merely to survive.

A catalyst arrives, however, in the form of an old cellist. He has watched from his window as a shell lands amid a crowd of his friends and neighbors lined up simply for bread. Twenty-two people are killed, and the cellist decides that he will stand at the site of the killing for twenty-two days and memorialize these people by playing a specific adagio once each day. He has no idea whether he will survive for this length of time or whether another shell will fall here or a sniper will pick him off, but he decides that acknowledging this portion of lost humanity is more important than his own personal survival. And so he begins.

As the other people we are reading about slowly absorb his music, little by little they are reminded, not just of better times, but of better values. Survival alone is not enough for life; something more is required. For example, the family man who spends so much of his time just getting enough fresh water for his family to drink--a very dangerous mission through multiple sniper points--decides that no matter how much more dangerous it will be, he will continue to provide water for his elderly and most unpleasant neighbor as well. The other characters we are following make different but similarly motivated decisions as well. In so doing they endorse, not just life, but human values. And the fact that these decisions are dangerous is brought home to the reader when a favorite character does not survive the decision made.

This is a story full of irony and contradiction. Just as the Adagio the cellist plays is a reconstruction of a fragment mostly destroyed in a previous war and possibly not even true to the original, the decisions made are fragmentary returns to different values and most are themselves contradictory. One character chooses to honor life by dignifying the dead. Another chooses death itself rather than the taking of life. The book seems to be saying that a well-lived life is itself dangerous and contradictory.

However grim, this is also a beautiful story--one that I highly recommend.
I read this book upon the recommendation of a musician friend, a string player, after reading several reviews by friends here on .

"The Cellist of Sarajevo" is a short first novel by Steven Galloway, a teacher of creative writing at the University of British Columbia. Set during the siege of Sarajevo during the 1990s, the book explores how people work to retain hope and meaning during a terrible and immediate war. The book is based upon a historical incident in which, following an explosion that killed 22 people, a cellist from Sarajevo played, at the site of the explosion, a piece called "Albinoni's Adagio" for 22 consecutive days to commemorate the loss of the 22 lives.

The book includes four primary characters, including the cellist. The book suffers from this diffusion of interest. The strongest character in the book is not the cellist but rather a 28-year old woman with the pseudonym of Arrow. Possessing extraordinary gifts with a rifle, Arrow becomes a reluctant sniper in the defense of Saravejo following the outbreak of the conflict. She is ambivalent, at the least, about her role as a killer and endeavors to limit her targets to armed soldiers and not to civilians. Arrow is given the mission of protecting the cellist from attack by snipers during his daily playing in commemoration of the 22 dead.

The other two major characters are Kenan, middle-aged with a wife and daughter, who makes a hazardous journey twice each week to secure water for his family and for a querulous aged neighbor and Dragan, 64. Dragan is a bakery worker, an essential occoupation which exempts him from military service. He lives uneasily with his in-laws after his wife and son have secured their escape to Italy. The alternating chapters of the book move back and forth among the four characters and their efforts to preserve something of themseleves amidst the daily shelling of the city.

With the cellist, the book explores music as a civilizing, enabling force which helps people, friend and enemy alike, carry on. Galloway does not show the reader much of the cellist in the book as the novel explores more the reactions of people to the cellist rather than the feelings of the cellist himself. Arrow is the most complex character in the story as she must learn to come to an understanding of what she has become and its limitations. The remaining two characters, Kenan and Dragan, tend not to be distinctly drawn.

The book intersperses descriptions of Saravejo, past and present, with the violence of the war to give an indication of what civilized community life might be. Each of the characters comes to a realization that human life is infinitely valuable in its mortality. Galloway writes in a spare, muffled style. I was vaguely dissatisfied with the way the story developed. The book doesn't have much backbone. It speaks in a quiet voice in which characters and events meld together. More focus and stronger organization would have been welcome. I am still grateful to my friend for recommending this book. It reminded me of the many things that make life precious.

Robin Friedman