Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Sarajevo

The books I've been reading over the past year or so have taken me all over the world and across time. My next stop: Sarajevo during the siege of Sarajevo in the 1990s. I am embarrassed to say that my recollection of this horrific event is vague, even though I have a good friend who came to the United States from Bosnia as a political refugee about that time.

Now, thanks to The Cellist from Sarajevo by Steven Galloway, I think I have an inkling of what happened and why the breakdown of Sarajevo's multiethnic community was so tragic. Galloway gives us three characters in addition to the cellist himself. Since this is a work of fiction, the cellist, who is based on a real person, is the only character not well developed. Rather, the novel tells the story of how the cellist's actions affected normal Sarajevans.

The true story behind the novel is this: After 22 people waiting in line to buy bread were massacred, the cellist Vedran Smajlović defied the risk of appearing on the street and, for 22 days, played Albinoni's Adagio in G minor in their honor. Meanwhile, in the hills surrounding Sarajevo, snipers picked off innocent civilians as they went about their daily lives.

All of the characters face their own moral dilemmas as they try to survive the siege. Although all are affected by the cellist's actions, only one has any direct relationship with him: a woman sniper code-named Arrow who has been assigned to protect the cellist by picking off would-be assassins hiding in the hills. His music touches her, indeed it even seems to touch the assassin waiting to kill him. Arrow does not want to kill the assassin, but she must. Yet later, when she is ordered to kill again, she refuses, putting her own life in danger.

"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 had the capacity for goodness. The notes were proof of that."

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