The Cellist of Sarajevo Book Review
Steven Galloway wrote the national bestseller The Cellist of Sarajevo along with Finnie Walsh and Ascension. The Cellist of Sarajevo is historical fiction takes place in 1992-1995 during the Bosnian war and the siege of Sarajevo. At the time the Bosnian war was caused by the ethnic and religious conflicts between Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats, and Muslim Bosnians. When the EU recognized a new “Bosnian” state, war immediately began and the Serbian military surrounded the city of Sarajevo. The book takes place in the city, torn apart by war. Vedran Smailovi? a cellist in Sarajevo witnessed a mortar attack on a line of people waiting to buy bread. The mortar killed 22 people for which Smailovi? played the Albinoin’s Adagio for 22 days.



The Cellist of Sarajevo is a fascinating book about the siege of Sarajevo. The Serbian military, which surrounded the city, rained bullets and mortar shells on the people inside. The story starts in media res as Arrow, a professional sniper for the city, lies on top of a building trying to shoot some of the men on the hill. The use of in media res is there to toss the reader into dramatic action of Arrow shooting and being shot at, rather than having exposition introducing us to the story. Arrow is a persona created by Alisa because of the war. Alisa says “I am Arrow, because I hate them. The women you knew hated nobody”. The war changed her from being an ordinary young woman to a professional sniper. She is assigned the special task of protecting the Cellist. She finds it an impossible task but she accepts the job.
Dragan and Kenan are the other two characters in the story. In their characters you can see the difficult and danger of living in Sarajevo. Although the two characters never meet they are very similar, for instance they both are ordinary people trying to living out their ordinary lives. Dragan and Kenan both remember what life used to be like before the mortars started falling and bullets started killing in cold blood. Kenan can still “fool himself into imagining that he’s on his way to work” while risking his life for his family trying to get water. In the book Kenan is fighting for his own and his family’s survival. Gripped by fear, Kenan makes his way to the brewery to get clean drinking water. Kenan has a kind and humble nature, full of optimism. Dragan on the other hand, has given up all hope in the city and the people in the city. He moves into his sister’s apartment after his apartment was hit by a mortar shell. He goes to the bakery that he works at to get some bread for him and his step family. Dragan is held up at an intersection as he meets an old friend Emina. Emina is an old friend whith who he discusses the situation of the siege.
The stories of the three characters are incorporated through Galloway’s excellent use of rhetorical strategies. He uses temporal distortion throughout the book. Temporal distortion is when all the characters have different timelines and their timelines are not chronological. Over the course of the book Dragan experiences 1 day, Kenan experiences 5 days, and Arrow experiences around 10 days. Galloway makes the three characters have equal length texts but time passes at different speeds for the three characters. A narrative strategy Galloway manages to use well is flashbacks. He uses flashbacks to explain the setting because he started the story with In Media Res. Galloway contrasts the city from what it was to what it is now through the use of flashbacks. Arrow has a flashback of when she is so happy that she pulls over the car but now she only feels lots of hatred. This shows how she used to be in relation to what the war has made of her. The characters have memories of times that happened before the war telling us about their history and personalities.