Cellist of Sarajevo - Steven Galloway

One of the cruelest events of the siege of Sarajevo was the shelling in 1992 of a group of civilians as they queued in the street in the hope of buying some bread. Twenty-two people lost their lives. Not long afterwards a musician living in an apartment overlooking the scene dragged his cello out onto the street and there he played Albinoni's Adagio in G Minor at a different time each day for twenty-two days. Sometimes a small crowd would gather to listen, often bringing flowers to lay in front of the cellist or in the crater caused by the shelling. "The Cellist of Sarajevo" is a fictionalised account of this event, told from the points of view of ...  Read the complete review

A couple of months ago I was looking for a selection of books to take on holiday with me. Some prime "reading time" was ahead of me and I wanted to make the most of it. I found myself perusing the shelves in WH Smiths where they had their usual abundance of "BOGOF" offers, and saw this - The Cellist of Sarajevo. Remembering a particularly fantastic review written by Fizzywizzy (do go and read it if you have any interest in purchasing this book - it is a far better review than I can hope to achieve now!), I picked the book up and added it to my collection. The book is set in the City of Sarajevo, part of the former Yugoslavia, ...  Read the complete review

About a year ago, I read an intriguing article in The Times about a man called Vedran Smailovic. A professional musician when the Bosnian war began in 1992, he was one of thousands of ordinary people who became trapped in the siege of Sarajevo. Nobody might ever have heard of Vedran outside of his home city, however, if it were not for his remarkable act of protest, where he defied the snipers firing into the city on a daily basis to play his cello for 22 successive days at the scene of a shelling that had killed 22 people queuing to buy bread. Dressed in evening tails, photographs of this defiance became iconic images of the war and made artists from David Bowie to U2 ...  Read the complete review

When this journey is first embarked upon, there is an element of surprise due to the nature of the language Galloway uses. Considering the subject matter, one would have thought that a wider vocabulary would be needed to discuss the intricacies of the turbulent subject of war. Perhaps not though, as the predicament of the individual protagonists that the book conveys, and the mortal dangers they face on a daily basis are beautifully written, albeit in a simplistic fashion. It is interesting how the four key characters are all separately drawn to the Cellist, who steadily becomes less important. What he stands for gradually turns out to be of greater ...  Read the complete review