The Cellist of Sarajevo (Hardcover)

by Steven Galloway (Author)
Key Phrases: hatless man, Edin Karaman, Colonel Karaman, Veliki Park (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Canadian Galloway (Ascension) delivers a tense and haunting novel following four people trying to survive war-torn Sarajevo. After a mortar attack kills 22 people waiting in line to buy bread, an unnamed cellist vows to play at the point of impact for 22 days. Meanwhile, Arrow, a young woman sniper, picks off soldiers; Kenan makes a dangerous trek to get water for his family; and Dragan, who sent his wife and son out of the city at the start of the war, works at a bakery and trades bread in exchange for shelter. Arrow's assigned to protect the cellist, but when she's eventually ordered to commit a different kind of killing, she must decide who she is and why she kills. Dragan believes he can protect himself through isolation, but that changes when he runs into a friend of his wife's attempting to cross a street targeted by snipers. Kenan is repeatedly challenged by his fear and a cantankerous neighbor. All the while, the cellist continues to play. With wonderfully drawn characters and a stripped-down narrative, Galloway brings to life a distant conflict. (May)
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From The Washington Post

In this elegiac novel inspired by an actual event during the siege of Sarajevo in 1992, Steven Galloway explores the brutality of war and the redemptive power of music. Crafted with unforgettable imagery and heartbreaking simplicity, his small book speaks forcefully to the triumph of the spirit in the face of overwhelming despair.

"He can't believe he will stop the war," thinks Arrow, the young female sniper assigned to protect a cellist who has vowed to play 22 concerts outside the bakery where 22 people were recently gunned down. "He can't believe he will save lives. . . . Perhaps he has gone insane." As Serb and Yugoslav soldiers battle, innocent citizens venture out of their homes to find simple necessities, risking death from snipers in the hills surrounding the city. "One moment the people are walking or running through the street, and then they drop abruptly as though they were marionettes and their puppeteer had fainted."

This tale of peril and protest is told through the eyes of four people -- Arrow, who has taken that name because she has become a killing machine; Kenan, a man who must navigate the perilous streets to find water for his family and for a quarrelsome neighbor; Dragan, an older man who works at one of the few operating bakeries in the city; and the fearless cellist. Based on the true story of Vedran Smailovic, who played Albinoni's "Adagio" daily in honor of the dead, Galloway's fictional cellist is more than a symbol of resistance. As Arrow listens to him play, "she leans back into the wall. She's no longer there. Her mother is lifting her up, spinning her around and laughing. The warm tongue of a dog licks her arm."

When the moment comes for Arrow to shoot a gunman who she knows is stalking the cellist, she has him in her sights, but she sees that "his finger isn't on the trigger." Realizing that he's enjoying the music, too, she is "sure of two things. The first is that she does not want to kill this man, and the second is that she must."

What happens to our humanity in the midst of violence and hatred? How do we maintain dignity and kindness in the face of atrocities? How do we reclaim ourselves? Listening to the cellist, Arrow "let the slow pulse of the vibrating strings flood into her. She felt the lament raise a lump in her throat. . . . Her eyes watered, and the notes ascended the scale. The men on the hills didn't have to be murderers. . . . She didn't have to be filled with hatred. The music demanded that she remember this, that she know to a certainty that the world still held the capacity for goodness. The notes were proof of that."

Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover; First Edition edition (May 15, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1594489866
• ISBN-13: 978-1594489860
• Product Dimensions: 7.2 x 5.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (29 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #47,419 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

32 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Tense," "Haunting," "Elegiac" , June 20, 2008

By	B. Evans (Chicagoland) - See all my reviews

Given the superb reviews from the Washington Post and other customers on this site, there is little to add to give readers a sense of what awaits them in a novel so well-written and thought-provoking that not only did I read it in one sitting, but the next night read it again.

I would encourage everyone to read the excerpt available via the Search-Inside feature, for it introduces the 28-year-old female sniper who goes by the pseudonym Arrow "so that the person who fought and killed could someday be put away." So riveting is her thinking and so powerful the last sentence of the novel that her story will stay vividly with me for a lifetime.

While other reviews have rightly focused on the four characters around which the novel is centered, also compelling is the plight of the city itself. Although Sarajevo became familiar to me during the Olympic games, one does not need to have seen the pre-war city to shudder at what happened to it, for as one of the characters takes circuitous routes to get to his work and food, he recalls its past as he's faced with its present. Yet, he muses, "every day the Sarajevo he thinks he remembers slips away from him a little at a time, like water cupped in the palms of his hands, and when it's gone, he wonders what will be left. He isn't sure what it will be like to live without remembering how life used to be, what it was like to live in a beautiful city." Or, I thought, what it would be like to try to cope with the destruction of wherever one lives, whatever the cause. In more ways than one, the author of "The Kite Runner" was absolutely correct when he called "The Cellist of Sarajevo" a "universal story."

NOTE: When I went online to find out more about Vedran Smailovic, the man who did indeed play for 22 days at the site where 22 people had been killed in Sarajevo, I discovered a fascinating article in the London Times which details at length the cellist's extreme displeasure at having been included in this book and his privacy thus invaded. The article, which also includes author Steven Galloway's reaction to Smailovic's reaction, is most easily accessed by going to the external links under the entry for Smailovic in Wikipedia.

NOTE: For those who, after reading this novel, are interested in learning more about life during the siege of Sarajevo, Zlata's Diary: A Child's Life in Wartime Sarajevo Revised Edition provides a 13-year-old girl's poignant non-fiction account. And for those wondering about other books the author of "The Cellist..." has written, yet another memorable read awaits you in his Ascension: A Novel.

21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars 16 years today, May 27, 2008

By	vitamin "A" (Brampton, ON Canada) - See all my reviews

Today happens to be the 16th anniversary of the mortar attack and as I read a news article about commemorating the victims(26) in Sarajevo I felt an urge to write a review about this book. I finished it recently and I felt that the author was able to capture the spirit of the people and what they went through being under siege. Not extremely graphic but with enough left for anyone's imagination to experience the horrors of war in their own mind and empathize with people of Sarajevo or any other human being experiencing war in modern times. Another thing I liked about the book is that the author stayed away from identifying the aggressors, causes and politics of the war and concentrated on survival and humanness of innocent civilians who seem to parish by hundreds of thousands in times of war. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to get a perspective on how a human spirit struggles through a war that appears to have no end.

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Truly Great Read!, May 24, 2008

By	Bruce Humbert "PhD Student" (Port Saint Lucie, FL United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I don't do many reviews - but felt compelled to offer one for this great book. It is a story that reminds us what makes us both good and evil - great and small - wise and insanely stupid - heroes and villians, all at the same time. Steven Galloway writes in a way that makes you feel that you not only know the people that he is writing about - but know them as friends or neighbors who you have known for a very long time.
It is the kind of page turner that will make short work of a weekend - and bring both a smile and a tear if there is any human in you...