The Cellist of Sarajevo

This book is simple, and yet so complex and profound. It's based on a real-life incident in Sarajevo during the awful war that was going back then. During those awful times, a man would brave snipers and bombs in the middle of the street to play the cello. The book is centred around the individuals who were affected by his reckless but brave act.
The writing was beautiful, unpretentious and filled with pathos. I was particularly arrested by the chapter where a character remembered how Sarajevo was like before the war ... while he walked the streets to work. Such a simple, normal act was fraught with danger because there is a sniper in the hills who randomly choses his victims. Yet, he had no choice as if he didn't get to work, he didn't get to eat. And as he braved the streets, hoping that he won't be sniper's chosen target today, he remembers how it was like before evil took over the world.
This book will make you ponder about humanity, about the love we're capable of and the casual cruelty we inflict on the world and on others.

Beautiful, brutal, intertwined story. I'd like to add it to my teaching rotation sometime soon.

Sorry...I know this is a favourite of many. Although I did believe that there were some poignant moments with 2 of the main characters: Dragon and Kenan, I was truly only interested in Arrow and the Cellist. I really enjoyed Arrow's Chapters and feel that at the end I knew her story and wished that there had been more of her included in the book. Dragon and Kenan's characters just dragged on for me. I found myself simply wading through their portions and wondering about Arrow. I wanted to know more about the Cellist....Or perhaps I wanted more on Dragon and Kenan so that I was involved in their stories.
I did love the writing...I just needed more...found it a bit lacking for me.
I feel guilty, as though I have missed something here...not only because everyone appears to LOVE this book but also I think because I in NO WAY HATED the book.
So many positives...just not my favourite.

I visited Sarajevo in the summer of 2017. I spent two weeks exploring it, drinking coffee near Sebilj, admiring the architecture, kissing the woman I loved on those little beautiful streets. I spoke to locals who are my age but are war survivors. The stories I heard in those two weeks stayed with me. Thus when I saw this book I knew I must read it!
The characters are so vivid and so real you can't help but feel you are wondering in those streets of Sarajevo yourself during the siege. The book takes your breath away and you cannot put it down. It makes you stop and think how would you survive something like this? How you go on about your life when your loved city becomes a war zone? Hopefully, I will never know.

Scary how a civilized country can devolve into anarchy. The way people adapt is encouraging and also frightening.

possibly the hardest book I've read this year, but lovely/inspiring.

The Cellist of Sarajevo came highly recommended, but I had my reservations. How could a thirty-two year old professor from Canada give any sort of justice to the Bosnian War, and do so in a mere 200 pages? The conflict is much too recent to easily dismiss any inaccuracies in the text. And it's difficult to ignore the obvious differences in growing up in Kamloops versus getting by in Sarajevo. Surely, it cannot be done. The problem was, I was imagining that Galloway's novel would be like nearly every other war novel, when in fact, The Cellist of Sarajevo breaks most of the rules of “war stories” and largely succeeds.

Galloway takes the four year siege and narrows the focus to such a tiny sliver. Although the book blurb conveys that this novel is about “four strangers,” the fourth being the titular cellist, it really centers on three. The cellist is little more than a device to tell the story and unite the others. (The “cellist” is based on a real person, Vedran Smailovic; his inclusion caused significant drama: “Out of the war, into a book and in a rage”.) These three characters are so unlike any other I have encountered in a war novel that it is shocking. Two of the three are merely men walking the streets with purpose. The third is a female sniper. All three are afraid, but only the sniper is doing something about it. The two men cower behind buildings and struggle with reconciling the past with the present.

Aside from the reversed war-time gender roles, I found it interesting how the characters most crippled by fear were the ones actually moving. It was the active participant, the sniper, who hid in the shadows and rarely moved. Such focus allows the characters to rise above the war that surrounds them and become closer to universal. It is by giving such a narrow scope—a family man in search of water who cannot stand up to his cantankerous neighbor, an elderly baker who seeks invisibility, and a sharp-shooter with a vendetta—that Galloway succeeds in putting the siege of Sarajevo on paper. I wish The Cellist of Sarajevo had made a bigger impact on me, but I think had Galloway tried to craft a more epic tale of war, he would've stepped into territory that would've been too foreign. As it is, The Cellist of Sarajevo gives those of us who didn't experience the war a glimpse of what it may have been like.

While the story at the center of “The Cellist of Sarajevo” is heart rending, the execution was lacking. With the exception of the chapters written from Arrow's point of view, which crackle and are the only reason I'm not giving this novel one star, the writing was plodding and uninspired. Every sentence in the other chapters was written in the same clunky meter and got in the way of the characters. In fact, the novel reads like a creative writing assignment which would be lucky to get a C-.