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The Cellist of Sarajevo
Atlantic Books
by Steven Galloway
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| Product Details |
ISBN/ASIN: 1843547414
Release Date:
Sales Rank: 1645
Average Rating: 
Media: Paperback
Audience Rating:
Product Group: Book
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| Product Description |
| Snipers in the hills overlook the shattered streets of Sarajevo. Knowing that the next bullet could strike at any moment, the ordinary men and women below strive to go about their daily lives as best they can. Kenan faces the agonizing dilemma of crossing the city to get water for his family. |
| Customer Reviews: Average Rating: 4.0/5 | | Boring: Rating: 1/5 |
This was possibly the most boring book I have ever read. It was tedious from start to finish. I've owned it for months but still haven't finished it. I've tried, really, I have - but I find myself skim reading entire sections.
I would never recommend buying this book. I agree with all the comments in the 1* section - especially the one about the publishers doing an amazing marketing job with this book. I thought I needed to read it. I really didn't. | | A powerful and moving portrait of war: Rating: 5/5 |
Sarajevo is a city under siege. On 27th May 1992, twenty two people are killed by a mortar shell as they wait outside to buy bread. In memory of those who died, a cellist sits in the street on twenty two consecutive afternoons and plays Albinoni's Adagio in G Minor on his cello.
The cellist, however, is not the main character in this book - although he is there in the background throughout the story, playing his music as a message of hope and inspiration. Instead, Galloway has chosen to focus on three different characters, who are each coping in their different ways with the changes war has brought to their lives.
One of these is Arrow, a young woman who was once the star of the university target shooting team. Now she's been recruited as an army counter-sniper and given the responsibility of protecting the cellist from attack. Then there's Kenan, a man in his forties for whom the simple task of going to collect water for his family means putting his life in danger. And finally there's Dragan, an older man who sent his wife and son out of Sarajevo before the siege began, and is now slowly making his way across the war-torn city to the bakery where he works.
I was only 11 years old when the Bosnian War started so probably wasn't paying a lot of attention to news reports about it - I'm ashamed to admit that I know very little about what happened and before I read this book was only vaguely aware that Sarajevo had been under siege. However, if you're looking for a book that will teach you the facts about the war, you'll need to look elsewhere as this book does very little to educate the reader about the war itself. We are never even told the nationality of any of the characters. The snipers surrounding the city are referred to as simply 'the men on the hill'; those defending Sarajevo are 'the men in the city'.
This vagueness was very effective because in a way, Steven Galloway was saying that it doesn't matter who's fighting who, it doesn't matter why a war began, because people everywhere are the same, have the same feelings and emotions, and are similarly affected by the pain and suffering of war. The author could have taken any war or any siege as the basis for this book and the overall mood he created would have been the same.
I can't say that I enjoyed this book because 'enjoyed' isn't the right word. Neither is 'loved'. But it was an incredibly powerful book and I'm glad I finally found time to read it. I think some readers would probably dislike the structure of the book with its alternating chapters from the viewpoints of each of the three characters, but it worked for me. Arrow's storyline was the most compelling and could have been a whole book on its own, but I also found it interesting to follow Dragan and Kenan as they dodged the snipers and negotiated hazardous bridges and ruined buildings on their dangerous journeys through the city.
The Cellist of Sarajevo doesn't tell us how the war started, the reasons for the war or even who the war was between. What it does attempt to tell us is the effects the war had on individual people, how they felt and how they tried to survive. | | `A target expands in size, brought into focus by time and velocity.': Rating: 5/5 |
'There is a moment before impact that is the last instant of things as they are. Then the visible world explodes.'
The inspiration for this novel is described in an afterword: at 4pm on 27 May 1992, not long after the beginning of the Siege of Sarajevo, a mortar shell struck a queue outside a bakery. Twenty two people were killed, and at least seventy were wounded. For the next twenty two days, a Sarajevo cellist played a piece (identified as Albinoni's Adagio in G minor) at 4pm each day to commemorate the victims. The cellist's heroic gesture of humanity is a mark of respect, and of civilization, which is in stark contrast to the brutal reality being endured in Sarajevo and provides both backdrop and timeframe for the three strands of the narrative.
We accompany Kenan and Dragan in their separate journeys across the dangerous city in search of water and food. Kenan must take a long and hazardous trip to collect water for his family and also for an elderly woman in his apartment block. Dragan works in a bakery where he is paid in bread. His journey is to that bakery for food.
Both journeys are difficult: snipers in the hills and on the rooftops make open spaces dangerous and ruined buildings, roads and bridges pose their own challenges. As they move cautiously towards their goals, each remembers Sarajevo as it once was: a pleasant and civilised city.
`There's nothing in a dead body that suggests what it was like to be alive.'
A young woman known as Arrow, a `counter-sniper' is ordered to keep the cellist alive. This is seen as symbolic, the cellist will make an attractive target for the snipers: `It's not about merely killing him. Shooting him is a statement.'
I found this a very moving novel. Short enough to read in one sitting, filled with enough examples of both courage and inhumanity to last for a lifetime.
Jennifer Cameron-Smith
| | The Cellist of Sarajevo: Rating: 5/5 |
| I was entirely enthralled by this book.The horrors of war, the helplessness of civilians caught up in conflict, the capacity for great cruelty, yet also the wonderful ability to overcome man's inhumanity in small acts of kindness. This novel uses a quiet tone to tell the story of Sarajevo during the siege-----no wild histrionics, but a telling of when, enough is enough, fear is overcome, and human beings can regain their dignity and sense of self. Also, as the female of the species I was pleased that the author strayed from the usual cliches and gave us a strong character. | | Lyrical, elegiac reflection on what endures in time of war: Rating: 5/5 |
| I loved this bleak tale of three very different lives in the besieged city of Sarajevo in the early 1990s, their threads connected by the cellist of the title. He has vowed to play for twenty-two days consecutively, at the time and place where twenty-two people died in a bread queue, killed in a mortar attack by the `men in the hills'. The city is tense, the people are hungry, weary, dying in sniper, mortar and shelling attacks every day as the siege wears on. In sparse, yet somehow fitting interior monologues that match the bleakness of the situation, Galloway captures the fear, the sense of having to cling hard to what remains of humanity, the struggle to remain in control. Through it all, the cellist's music, an almost absurdly reckless gesture, redeems and lifts up, reasserts the human amidst the grimly inhuman. It's not a happy ending, and for one of the characters it's a shockingly violent, though in some ways inevitable, end - albeit one that, paradoxically, reasserts something of what it means to be a person. A lyrical, elegiac reflection on what endures when all is stripped away, all the more memorable for its being in a consistently minor, understated key, fitting perfectly with the environment in which the story unfolds. Excellent. | |
