War is hell. We've heard it a million times, and we've seen in on the page or on the movie screen lots of different ways. In Steven Galloway's novel, The Cellist of Sarajevo, three people try in their own ways to survive the seige of Sarajevo. A fourth character, the cellist of the title, is based on a real person who played his cello once a day for 22 consecutive days during the seige to commemorate the deaths of 22 people who died in a bombing as they waited in line for bread.
The three main characters intersect in different ways with his fictionalized performances. While the Sarajevo of the seige was hell for the civilians trapped in the crossfire between the factions trying to take control, the civilians were still longing for the city they knew before the war.
Galloway's fiction is poetic; the images, while heartbreaking, are clear, simple and effective. But he shows us more than the war of guns and bombs. He shows us the war for humanity, the war for hearts and minds.
The Neland Women's Book Club settled in Pat's gracious living room to dig into this book. Tonight I was the not-so-fearless leader, and we had great attendance! This is good, because then I know everyone will talk a lot, and it won't depend on me.
But this book is easy to talk about anyway. The writing is gorgeous in spite of--and because of--the subject. Each of the characters is struggling, not just to survive physically, but to keep their humanity intact. The author works out, through events and thoughts and actions and conversations, who each character was, is and wants to be. What the city was, is and could be. What human beings are meant to be.
Sarajevo was a beautiful, historic, cultivated, and proudly multicultural city. In 1984 (sorry ladies, I had that wrong, it wasn't 1988), the Winter Olympics took center stage. Then, in 1992, Bosnia-Herzegovina declared its independence. Serbians were concerned that they would be marginalized, and one day Serb militants in the hills fired on demonstrators and the city came under seige. Snipers hid in the hills and picked off whoever they could. Bombs damaged or destroyed much of the city. It wasn't until 1996 that the United Nations finally got involved and helped bring an end to the seige. In the meantime, civilians were stuck, left to survive as best they could.
The characters in the book each want to be able to recover the life they had before the war, and they are each afraid that the criminals, the soldiers, the black marketeers might win. If they win, what will it mean for the beloved city? "If a city is made anew by men of questionable character, what will it be?" There are moments when each character remembers the astonishing beauty of their ordinary pre-war lives. The music of the cellist brings it back to them.
One character, Dragan, reflects on the fact that "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."
Arrow, a young woman who has become a sniper for the city's defenders, realizes that she has moved from hating the actions of the "men in the hills" to hating the men themselves, and that this would be the defeat of the Sarajevo that she loves, as well as the defeat of her own soul.
This seige happened in our lifetimes. Most of us were well into adulthood while it was going on. Yet none of us had much recollection of the events or the reasons for what happened. In one interview with Galloway, the interviewer mentions that there is little English-language literature about Sarajevo. The author says "There were some people outraged, but most people thought of it as just tribal, too complicated, and just washed their hands of it as a result." He went on to say "One of the things that really bugs me lately is that in lots of 'books of the year' lists that are out [for 2008, when the book was published]...they put The Cellist of Sarajevo in historical fiction, while there are plenty of books listed in the contemporary fiction sections that take place in the eighties! How is it that a mere ten years ago becomes 'historical'?"
While this book opened our eyes to what happened in Sarajevo, it also explores what happens in any war, when neighbors turn on neighbors and anger turns into hatred and murder. We like to think that can't happen in a "melting pot" like the United States, but we wonder if it is possible that there are factions within Grand Rapids with that sort of division. Recently, a play called "Lines" in a local theater explored "the experience of race" in this city. Someone in our group rightly pointed out that we really have no idea how our own little society is perceived by others.
Then it was time to eat, of course. Food is always an important part of any Neland gathering. Just ask the Fun Committee. Yes, we really have a Fun Committee. We are Christian Reformed; we like things to be planned in advance, and we need to know when it is time to have fun, so we must have committees for these things. That way we can be sure there will be good food available at any event. It's how we do things, and we like it that way.
Thanks for another good night, ladies!
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