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The Cellist of Sarajevo Steven Galloway 9781843547419 Books

Download As PDF : The Cellist of Sarajevo Steven Galloway 9781843547419 Books

The Cellist of Sarajevo Steven Galloway 9781843547419 Books

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.


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The Cellist of Sarajevo Steven Galloway 9781843547419 Books Reviews

I was so overwhelmed by this story that I can't find the right words to write about it. I'm both sorry and relieved that it's over -- sorry because it was enjoyable to read, yet relieved because it's persistent tension was finally over.

This is the story of a how the music played by a cellist in the street of a war-torn city provides a few minutes of harmony each day to soothe the constant fear and suffering of the people who live there.

The fear and suffering are reflected in three characters who never interact with each other. One is a man whose life revolves around walking to gather bottles of water from the town's brewery for his family. Another man, whose wife and children escaped to Italy, works at a bakery and brings home fresh bread to his sister's family, with whom he is living. The third chapter is a young female sniper who wages a private individual war with the men occupying the hill above their city.

Steven Galloway made me feel like I was on those streets alongside those characters as they wondered whether someone on the hill would shoot them as they crossed the street. Their fear and helplessness became my own, and their love of what their city had once been to them reminded me of what I loved about my own home town.

I'm still not sure I've found the right words, but there's no doubt about the powerful and profound impact this story has had on me.
I came upon Steven Galloway’s novel “The Cellist of Sarajevo” while I was doing research on Vedran Smailovic, the true cellist of Sarajevo and after I learned that Smailovic was intensely angry that Galloway had used him as the inspiration for his novel and mis-represented him in many ways. Hence, I must say my perspective was rather biased as I read the novel after living in Sarajevo for 9 months and understanding a bit about Smailovic and the siege. I am rather surprised, therefore, by all the accolades that have been bestowed upon Galloway’s book and by its longevity as reflected in the fact that the University of Maryland Baltimore Campus featured the book at a recent evening lecture, punctuated by a talented young cellist and a professor who talked about the intimate human-like quality of a cello.

I did not find the characters in Galloway’s books especially appealing. I know Arrow was based on a real character, actually a Serbian who killed Serbs for the Bosnian side ([...]) and who claimed to have a bad conscience from all her killings although she claimed from her hospital bed to be a “war junkie.” I had difficulty reconciling Galloway’s introspective narrative on Arrow’s internal thoughts and reflections with my own view of Arrow and the siege. I was not sure why the characters, Arrow, Dragan, and Kenan, were so perplexed about the purpose of the cellist’s acts, or why he seemed to be a rather vague symbol in the novel, despite its title. From what I read about the real cellist, he was expressing his response to the siege in the language that naturally emanated from his soul and was also paying homage to the many victims of the war. Rather than perplexing to Bosnians, he inspired them, gave them courage to take a stand for the civilization that they referred and the cosmopolitanism that Sarajevo stood for. I found it far-fetching that the Serbian sniper was so mesmerized by the cellist’s playing that he hesitated and dreamed so that Arrow could easily kill him. For those who have not lived in Sarajevo and not read the real stories of survival, Galloway’s novel is no doubt powerful . It has certainly played a significant role in providing readers the experience of the horror of war, and of the challenge of survival. But the siege was so much more complex than these experiences and its impact so much more far-reaching than any book could give justice to. Nonetheless, Galloway did an outstanding job with a difficult subject and presented three different faces and perspective from which people saw and lived those horrible days of destruction. I am glad I read it despite my misgivings.
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.