The Cellist of Sarajevo

We have famously short-term memories as a culture. This is why political ads work so well. We forget that it was the other guy that put us where we are today. But being stupid about the recent past isn't supposed to apply to me so it was with increasing embarrassment that realized how little I remembered about the Bosnian conflict as I devoured Steven Galloway's excellent book, The Cellist of Sarajevo.

Galloway himself admits his book isn't thoroughly accurate and the reader is left with little information about the conflict or its roots. What he offers instead is a profound look at life in a modern war zone. I had to keep reminding myself that I wasn't reading about WWII and that I had watched some of this on television, in a very recent lifetime.

The book is divided by point of view. We are introduced first to the cellist, a man finally so devastated by the senseless killing around him that he vows to play Albinoni's Adagio in G Minor for 22 days straight at the site of the most recent massacre. Galloway bases this character on a real person so you get a whiff of authenticiy. As the cellist begins his vigil, we are introduced to three other characters-Kenan, a father and husband just trying to get drinkable water to his family (an odyssey in his wartorn city), Dragan, a pensioner, trying to get his daily bread (literally), and Arrow, the sniper recruited by the "defenders" of Sarajevo to take out the "aggressor" snipers targeting civilians throughout the streets. Each chapter begins with one of these characters highlighted while the other names recede into a grey type. I loved this detail, even though it wasn't that difficult to keep the characters apart, a real gift from an author. The visual was just a nice way to begin a chapter.

After months of watching their beloved and beautiful city become ruins--a city hitherto best known for its role in the start of WWI--it comes down to this: Each character daily weighs what might keep him or her alive. If you're dressed as a penguin, is a sniper more or less likely to choose you as target? Kenan contemplates this very thought as he runs with his water canisters strapped to his back, Do the men on the hills tend to shoot at people they find funny, or spare them? If the person who crosses the intersection before you is killed, do you stand a better or worse chance of making it across? What if the sniper misses? Is he having a bad day, or is he playing with you? And, in the Arrow the sniper's case, she wonders, is she a killer or a defender? And what is she defending, exactly? In the end, the character of Dragan phrases it this way: Is the real Sarajevo the one where people were happy, treated each other well, lived without conflict? Or is the real Sarajevo the one he sees today, where people are trying to kill each other, where bullets and bombs fly down from hills and the buildings crumble to the ground?

Author Galloway begs his characters to find and keep their humanity while their lives have become little more than those of scurrying rats. The few animals--dogs mostly--who appear all seem strangely more settled by this new world of danger, while the humans themselves are regressing. The question is, will one cellist's work and stubborness be enough to remind them all of where they've come and who they truly are? And will we the readers pay attention long enough to remember that humanity exists even under the most savage conditions.