Steven Galloway’s The Cellist of Sarajevo is a perceptive study of the effects a war can have on those who have lived through it.

However, as Galloway delves into the characters’ states of mind, even the psychologically damaging effects of war become coupled with a sense of sobriety and obligation to overcome the feeling of helplessness and defeat that war brings upon those affected.

While the characters of Kenan, Arrow and Dragan try to make sense of both life and death in chaotic wartime Sarajevo, it is the cellist who represents the channel which clearly distinguishes between right and wrong; life and death; good and evil; and everything else that surfaces in times of war.

For 22 days, the cellist, seated on the site of a mortar attack, plays Albinoni’s Adagio to revere the memory of those who died in an attack the cellist himself witnessed.

Galloway portrays the attack that has affected the cellist so deeply: ‘The cellist doesn’t know any of this now, as he sits at his window in the sun and plays. He isn’t yet aware. But it’s already on its way. It screams downward, splitting air and sky without effort. A target expands in size, brought into focus by time and velocity. There is a moment before impact that is the last instant of things as they are. Then the visible world explodes.’

Just as war sensitises some, it also desensitises others. The author expresses this dilemma as he portrays both human magnanimity as well has human depravity — traits that come out quite clearly in the different characters who brave through the Siege of Sarajevo. He explores how the meaning of a ‘normal life’ becomes altered in a war-torn city and how people become used to seeing others get shot and even die in the middle of a street.

In times of war desensitisation reaches a dangerous level, where people look for ways to profit from human misery without qualms of any sort. While some sell household items in order to feed their families, others are ‘untouched by financial pressures... drive around in new Mercedes, haven’t lost any weight, and possess a ready supply of goods most people only remember from before the war.’

It is interesting how war zones are the same nearly everywhere in the world. Sarajevo’s Sniper’s Alley and Swat’s Khooni Chowk (Bloody Square) invoke similar horrors and signify the brutality that has changed forever the people living in the affected regions.

Those defending Sarajevo assign Arrow the task of keeping the cellist alive. While she struggles to keep up with the job, what troubles her is the fact that she has been transformed from an average Bosnian girl who hated no one to a soldier who must live and die with the burden of hating an enemy.

Galloway highlights the survival instinct of the human race which is as committed to preserving and recreating civilisation as it is to protecting the bare physical essence of human life. One must ‘do what he can to prevent the world he wants to live in from fading away. As long as there is war, life is a preventive measure’, he writes. This enthusiasm for life propels Kenan, Dragan, Arrow, the cellist and even Mrs Ristovski, Kenan’s bothersome neighbour.

As they struggle to hold their world together and keep their memories of a once-peaceful Sarajevo in tact, they are continually visited by doubts — doubts about the city, about peace, about war, about life and death, and even about the moral legitimacy of fighting back ‘the men on the hills’ who ‘didn’t have to be murderers’.

The author explores what it means to live in fear — fear that stays even when the situation that inspired it is long over. But a city living in fear is still not a dead entity. If Sarajevo was to die, ‘it won’t be because of the men on the hills, it will be because of the people in the valley. When they’re content to live with death, to become what the men on the hills want them to be, then Sarajevo will die.’

Though in most part a work of fiction, The Cellist of Sarajevo was inspired by the story of the Bosnian cellist Vedran Smailovic who witnessed the shelling incident that led to the deaths of 22 people. Smailovic played Albinoni’s Adagio for 22 days at the site to honour the victims. In 1993 he managed to leave Sarajevo and currently lives in Northern Ireland.

The significance of Adagio lies in the fact that it was found among the ruins of a library in Dresden, miraculously surviving after the building was firebombed during World War II. The cellist’s playing of it is an effort to immortalise the human spirit as it braves through insanity.

Interestingly, in the novel, the cellist represents the author himself. Galloway’s work is a celebration of life during a time of death and madness.

 
The Cellist of Sarajevo
By Steven Galloway
Knopf, Canada
ISBN 978-0-307-39703-4
272pp. Cdn $29.95