The siege of Sarajevo lasted some four years. Steven Galloway invites us to experience it for 3 weeks, through the lives of Kenan, a young man whose life seems to revolve round the hugely difficult and dangerous task of getting water for his family: of Dragan, an older man whose family have fled to Italy, and who works, when work is there, in a bakery: and of Arrow, a young female sniper, who kills only soldiers, not her fellow-citizens. Theirs is a life of drudgery, deprivation and extreme and daily danger.

Like everyone in the city who experiences it, they find the cello player who plays, despite the risks, every day for 22 days to commemorate the 22 lives lost as they queued for bread becomes a compelling presence in their existences. I found the book compelling too, a stripped down narrative that invites a comparison between the formerly civilised and cultured city of Sarajevo, and the squalid frightening place it had become, with little food, transport, comforts or amenities of any kind. There is no plot as such. The unremitting sameness of the struggle to stay alive and to defend the much-loved city is the story. A good book. A thought-provoking book. ( )

I flagged a lot of prose in this book mostly for its precise, dense, crushing hopelessness. Then again, it is a Slavic story. This Slavic story, however, is written by an Irishman, and so I think feigns hopelessness in some degree. Artfully. Many survive. Many times the veil of death and the greyness of war are lifted—a joke about plenty is told and retold between husband and wife, a man mentally repaints his surroundings as they were and how they may be, another hauls water for an empty old woman because it is the right thing to do, and to her peril, a sniper draws a moral line in the sand.

Why does the author sketch any hope into this story? The Irish are a race that survived 500 years of war; their survival instinct is grounded in a tolerance for calamity, for irony and a desire to drink heavily from the tonic of denial and the relief of humor. An Irish author cannot sustain nor end a story in total despair; thus, he ultimately offers civility as war’s cure, even if fleeting as with the Cellist’s hymn. The hymn is the deliberate act that unites the central characters of the story and boosts the limp heart of the city. How he makes the cellist the center is proof to me that the Irish truly can’t tell a story the way it is, they have to make it brighter than that.

Ultimately, war has limits. Arrow, a female sniper, feels war is a job. And a liability. Eventually she will be asked to do something she does not want to do, foreshadowing her demise. (p. 57) The line is not between a just and an unjust death, but a death that doesn’t matter. In choosing her line, her time of death, she reserves a dignity where “She would not let the men on the hills decide when she went below ground. P 124

A public wake. Well, the author is indeed Irish. In playing for days on end the cellist provides this venue for public grief, he reminds people of their humanness. The purpose is not to forget. “Once we forget we become a ghost.” Like Mrs. Ristovski. Does he play ‘to stop something from happening or to prevent a worsening? “Death is not just a disappearance of the flesh. When they’re content to live with death, then Sarajevo will die.” Small civilities are worth living for.

But Arrow alone prepares to pay the ultimate price in saying no to war. In confronting death, she reclaims her name, her self and Sarajevo’s identity.
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I flagged a lot of prose in this book mostly for its precise, dense, crushing hopelessness. Then again, it is a Slavic story. This Slavic story, however, is written by an Irishman, and so I think feigns hopelessness in some degree. Artfully. Many survive. Many times the veil of death and the greyness of war are lifted—a joke about plenty is told and retold between husband and wife, a man mentally repaints his surroundings as they were and how they may be, another hauls water for an empty old woman because it is the right thing to do, and to her peril, a sniper draws a moral line in the sand.

Why does the author sketch any hope into this story? The Irish are a race that survived 500 years of war; their survival instinct is grounded in a tolerance for calamity, for irony and a desire to drink heavily from the tonic of denial and the relief of humor. An Irish author cannot sustain nor end a story in total despair; thus, he ultimately offers civility as war’s cure, even if fleeting as with the Cellist’s hymn. The hymn is the deliberate act that unites the central characters of the story and boosts the limp heart of the city. How he makes the cellist the center is proof to me that the Irish truly can’t tell a story the way it is, they have to make it brighter than that.

Ultimately, war has limits. Arrow, a female sniper, feels war is a job. And a liability. Eventually she will be asked to do something she does not want to do, foreshadowing her demise. (p. 57) The line is not between a just and an unjust death, but a death that doesn’t matter. In choosing her line, her time of death, she reserves a dignity where “She would not let the men on the hills decide when she went below ground. P 124

A public wake. Well, the author is indeed Irish. In playing for days on end the cellist provides this venue for public grief, he reminds people of their humanness. The purpose is not to forget. “Once we forget we become a ghost.” Like Mrs. Ristovski. Does he play ‘to stop something from happening or to prevent a worsening? “Death is not just a disappearance of the flesh. When they’re content to live with death, then Sarajevo will die.” Small civilities are worth living for.

But Arrow alone prepares to pay the ultimate price in saying no to war. In confronting death, she reclaims her name, her self and Sarajevo’s identity.



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I was initially planning to give this book a lower score since it was so painful to read. I realized that just because it traumatized me was not a good reason to lower it. It is war and war is all around: Ukraine, Gaza/Israel and other places. This is a look back at a real event in the mind of the author when Sarajevo was under siege and a cellist decided he would play in the street for a number of days: 1 for every person killed after a massive attack on the city in that specific spot. The people whose lives are affected by the war are many: the snipers hiding in the hills to shoot anyone they can see, the counter snipers who try to kill them, including one who can no longer use her real name because she doesn't consider who she is as really her. There is the man who must walk miles every 4 days to find clean water for his family knowing at each crossing and bridge he too could be a victim of snipers. Then there is the military supposedly on their side. And through it all, the cellist comes and plays the same tune every day, beautiful and passionate. ( )

Here's what I wrote in 2009 about this read: "Four lives in the hell of Sarajevo under sieze in the mid 1990's; humanity survives. Educational and ultimately inspirational." ( )