The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway (2008. Riverhead Books. ISBN 978-1-59448-365-3).
I was asked to read Galloway’s novel of war torn Bosnia/Herzegovina’s capital city as a precursor to the book being selected for the area “One Book, One Community” program of our local library. I’d heard whispers about this novel but had not yet picked it up. Sally Anderson at the Bookstore at Fitger’s put a copy aside for me. I was a bit surprised when I picked up The Cellist in that I was expecting something weighty and thick, on the order of my own war novel about Yugoslavia, The Legacy, or Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. Instead, the volume I walked out of Fitger’s with is best described, in terms of its physical presence, as a novella longing to be a novel. But the tale’s diminutive size was and is deceptive. There is one whale of a tale hiding inside the guppyesque stature of The Cellist.
Galloway, who is a teacher of creative writing at the University of British Columbia, transports us into the Bosnian capital city during the siege of that city by Bosnian Serbs. He doesn’t, as I often tend to do, bog the fictional tale down with historical details or dwell on the misplaced historical perspective of the attacking forces. He leaves it the reader to explore the why behind what took place between 1992 and 1996 in a valley of the Dinaric Alps and very simply (yet eloquently) tells the story of four very different inhabitants of the encircled city. There is no one protagonist in the tale, though the cellist, who explores the same tune every afternoon amidst the ruins of the city in memory of an atrocity that occurred on the very spot where he plays, forms the central figure in the lives of the other three Sarajevoians Galloway profiles. Much like The Red Badge of Courage (Stephan Crane’s brilliantly terse and compact fictional account of the American Civil War) The Cellist of Sarajevo leaves much to the imagination and discovery of the reader as it guides its audience into a once beautiful and graceful mountain city now wrecked and torn by insidious destruction and hate. There is no preaching, no pontificating to be found within the 231 pages of this tale; only the examination of struggle and the day-to-day dread of civilians constantly harassed and under threat of ethnic cleansing and extinction from the Serbian irregulars hunkered down in the surrounding hills.
Brilliantly conceived. Excellently executed. You will remember the end of this novel, a haunting scene worthy of portrayal by our best young actress in a film adaptation, for the rest of your life.
Incredible.
5 stars out of 5. I urge you to pick the book up and participate in the upcoming One Book, One Community event!
