Bookreporter.com - THE CELLIST OF SARAJEVO by Steven Galloway

THE CELLIST OF SARAJEVO
Steven Galloway
Riverhead Books
Fiction
ISBN: 9781594489860

Reading THE CELLIST OF SARAJEVO isn’t quite like remembering where you were when John F. Kennedy was assassinated, or when the FLQ crisis briefly gripped Canada in martial law, or when the horror of 9/11 stopped the whole world in its tracks. But for a nanosecond of history back in 1992, news cameras captured the bizarre and poignant scene of a cellist, attired in full concert dress, playing alone amid the ruins of Sarajevo.

For 22 improbable days --- accompanied by background shellfire, dangerously close sniper bullets and an increasingly sympathetic global following --- real-life professional musician Vedran Smailovic appeared each afternoon and played his cello near the ruins of what had once been one of the city’s few operating bakeries. On May 27, 1992, a bomb launched from the hills outside Sarajevo had landed amid a line of hungry men, women and children waiting to buy bread; 22 of them were killed instantly, many more were wounded.

The world was hardly unaware that this once beautiful and elegant capital of the former Yugoslavia and gracious Olympic showpiece was under siege and would be for more than half of that terrible decade --- fractured irreparably along ethnic, religious and political lines that have not healed to this day. But much of the world chose to ignore the turmoil of Eastern Europe, treating it as just another vaguely annoying Balkan spat instead of the up-close and devastating human tragedy it really was.

As one of the 20th century’s most improbable heroes, Vedran Smailovic helped to re-focus global consciousness on the true cost of war. That’s why the image of his lonely figure outlined against broken buildings makes such an indelible imprint on the psyche. And that’s also why Canadian author Steven Galloway prefaces his emphatically fictional account behind that compelling 1992 news photo by telling readers that THE CELLIST OF SARAJEVO would not mention Bosnians, Muslims, Serbs, Christians, the UN, or portray any actual individual.

Instead, Galloway draws rough, ragged and intentionally incomplete sketches of ordinary people caught up in the cellist’s musical elegy, drawn in various ways to the hauntingly beautiful melodies that briefly overcome the rasp and scream of weapons fire. His spare strokes create layers of feeling and imagery against the gray background of the city, alighting by turns on a young father making a long weekly trek for water, a lonely senior citizen whose family has escaped to Italy, or a young woman who survives as a virtuoso sniper. Along with them we meet a series of peripheral, almost ghostly characters that intersect haphazardly with their lives, each person’s existence and perceptions completely reconfigured by the necessities of war.

During those few short weeks when word of the cellist’s amazing feat of musical defiance spreads from one devastated Sarajevo neighborhood to another, people are drawn into a strange solidarity. Meeting at street corners, food queues or water hoses, they tell one another that the cellist has survived one more day without being shot or captured.

Galloway says least of all about the cellist himself, beyond the sparse identification that places him near the spot where the fatal bomb decimated his neighborhood. Keeping a respectful distance throughout the book, he nevertheless creates an intimate and moving portrait of collective grief and agony, conveyed almost entirely through incidental people who pass within the sight and sound of the cello’s lament.

It’s a doubly painful irony, however, that the subtly delineated title character of Galloway’s story should have evoked a bitter response from the “real” cellist of Sarajevo. Vedran Smailovic (now living in Ireland) briefly became a 1990s cause celebre, featured in a number of international arts-for-peace projects. Today, he condemns THE CELLIST OF SARAJEVO as an exploitive appropriation of his identity, rather than the profound meditation on the ravages of war that it was intended to be --- and actually is.

But as we all know too well in our conflicted world, the psychic “collateral damage” of war runs even deeper than its material and physical wounds. For so many in the former Yugoslavia and in the battered jewel that was once Sarajevo, the healing has yet to begin.

That’s why both Vedran Smailovic and Steven Galloway did what they did --- and why it is not a vain hope that they may one day share artistic agreement in defiance of war and injustice.

--- Reviewed by Pauline Finch (paulinefinch@rogers.com)

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