The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway

Read for: Canadian Books Challenge and What’s in a Name Challenge

In Sarajevo a cellist is sitting at a window watching his friends and neighours in line for bread when they are all killed by a mortar.  He decides to go out into the streets every day at the same time for 22 days to play and Adagio for each person killed in the attack.  The novel tells the story of three people living in Sarajevo during the siege in the 1990′s.  Each of them is affected by the cellist and his actions.  I actually found that although the book was named after him, the cellist wasn’t actually the focus of the book.  It was more about living and surviving in the city during the siege.

It was interesting (that’s not quite the right term but it’s the best I’ve got right now) to read about living in Sarajevo at the time.  In the past few months I’ve also read Left to Tell about the Rwandan genocide and A Thousand Splendid Suns about the Taliban in Afghanistan (and last year The Book of Negroes about slavery).  I’ve known that these kind of things were happening in the world but reading about them inspires me to find out more about what really happened and why and because they are so much more modern than books I’ve read about WWII or other conflicts they hit so much closer to home.  I am consistently amazed at the incredible cruelty that human beings have the ability to inflict on each other.  It’s really disgusting.

I think it’s really important to read books like this and feel that disgust and anger about the atrocities that occurred.  We need to remember so we can try to prevent these kinds of things from happening in the future.  A common theme in these books is the people who never thought it could happen to them.  That really hits close to home because that’s what I’m constantly thinking as a I read these novels.  “That could never happen in Canada.”  But who knows, maybe it could?

Anyway, back to the book!  I thought it was well written but sometimes I felt it was a little contrived.  It just didn’t feel completely sincere to me at times.  Possibly that’s because it’s impossible to write a book about something you don’t know.  It sounds like Galloway did all the research he could but I just don’t think it’s possible to really understand what it’s like to go through something like this unless you’ve actually experienced it.  (Not that you’d ever WANT to!)

The thing that’s cool about this book is that there really was a Cellist of Sarajevo.  The details aren’t exactly the same but there was a man, Vedran Smailovic, who played Albinon’s Adagio during the siege.  Apparently Smailovic wasn’t too pleased about the book though!