BLAIR WOYNARSKI
Arts Writer

A title is an important thing, and each one has its own story. They take on socialized meaning and act as a beacon to potential readers of what is contained. Some are hard to decipher, and some are not.

It doesn’t take a lot of analysis to pin Eat, Pray, Love as a light-hearted, soul-searching romantic memoir and Pleasuring the Pirate as a hilariously trashy soft-porn romance dime novel on sale in the Zellers bargain bin for $4.99 (it’s probably still there if you want to pick it up).

I don’t know exactly what it is about the specific word arrangement of The Cellist of Sarajevo, but it’s hard to imagine it indicating anything other than an elegiac war story — and you wouldn’t be half wrong.

This Steven Galloway novel takes place during the Siege of Sarajevo, the civil war in Bosnia that occurred from 1992 to 1996, where most of the city of Sarajevo was destroyed or damaged.

But this novel is not a history lesson. It picks up an unspecified amount of time into the siege, after a significant portion of Sarajevo has been laid to waste. Politics never enter into the discussion. There are no references to Serbs or Yugoslavs, and only a couple references to Bosnia — characters instead refer to “the men on the hills” and “the defenders.”

At the centre of all this conflict is one cellist. Twenty-two people were killed by a mortar shell standing in a bread line and this cellist is returning to the site of the massacre to play a composition called Albinoni’s Adagio once a day for 22 days.

This action doesn’t seem that significant until you consider that Sarajevo is surrounded by enemy snipers, and sitting still in the middle of the street is akin to suicide.

The narrative follows three separate characters. Kenan is a man trying to keep his family together; he must undertake a long and dangerous journey to the edge of the city simply to bring back fresh water. Dragan is an old baker trying to go to work to bring back bread for his family, but is halted when he must cross a street under the eye of an enemy sniper. Arrow is a former biathlete who was recruited to the Bosnian army as a counter-sniper when the siege started. She is given the task of protecting the cellist until he completes his mission.

It is a difficult book to sum up. “Stirring” would be a good word. It distils a vast military conflict down to a very personal, human level, with the snapshots we see from each of the three characters. No one talks about broader politics or even allies themselves to one side of the conflict; they just know that since they are in the city, they are an enemy to the men on the hills. They live a fractured existence where electricity is an infrequent luxury and the sounds of mortars and sniper fire are woven into the fabric of existence. They run around like ants, trying to complete a job, but aware that they may end up trampled by something much bigger than them.

Chapters are not numbered, but are named after separate characters of the story as the perspective cycles through the three protagonists. This can make following the plot confusing, especially since each storyline spans a different length of time.

My main complaint is that the novel lacks faith in itself to convey its own message. As a result, it descends to heavy-handed moralizing at times, when characters find themselves mulling over the same philosophical idea repeatedly. It also gets caught in a slump a few times where the action seems to be moving forward, but then doesn’t. It helps to get across the futility of the struggle, but does so at the expense of maintaining flow.

Steven Galloway is a rising star in Canadian literature. But the problem with Can Lit is that people always put it under a microscope, searching for “the Canadian voice,” because we want to believe that we have one. The Cellist of Sarajevo doesn’t bother trying to be a Canadian novel. It has settled into a universally recognisable place.

You might think you can’t relate to these characters because you can’t comprehend the reality of the siege, but neither can they. The characters do not understand what has happened or how it has happened, but nevertheless have to drag themselves through each day and live with it. In this way, we can find elements of our own fractured existences, where we rage against things we can’t control and where we pull apart from people at the moments we need to keep together most of all.

This is probably not the best book to read if you’re feeling depressed. Or maybe it is. After all, it’s about finding a reason to keep moving, no matter how hopeless the situation may seem. I won’t say it’s a masterpiece, but no matter where you are, The Cellist of Sarajevo will offer you something valuable.