The Cellist of Sarajevo - Steven Galloway
Set during the siege of Sarajevo in the mid-1990s, this novel tells the story of three inhabitants of the city struggling to live their lives as normally as possible. While they do so, an anonymous cellist (based on a real-life figure) decides to honour the 22 victims of a particular bombing by playing a particular piece of music on that spot each day for 22 days.
The plot of the story, as such, isn't really all that important. One character crosses town for some bread, another seeks to protect the cellist from assassination... The idea of the novel seems to be to simply portray what life in a city under siege would be like, and in this it succeeds beautifully.
I recommend this book for that reason.
As an interesting extra tidbit of information: apparently the real life cellist was upset that Galloway didn't contact him before writing the novel, and didn't like how fictionalised his story had become. However, Galloway has sought to make amends, and also pointed out that he was only inspiring his character on the real life figure, rather than attempting to tell his actual story. Still, it pays to contact people if you're going to write regarding them.
Comments
Post a Comment