The Cellist of Sarajevo

This is a wonderful book! I highly recommend reading it.

Brief summary and review, no spoilers.This novel takes place during the siege of Sarajevo in the early 1990s. It is told from the viewpoint of four different characters.The first character - and we only read his POV briefly - is from a cellist who is living in Sarajevo during its siege during the Bosnian War. He witnesses the death of 22 people who are blown up while waiting in a line for bread at a bakery. He decides that he is going to go out in the streets and play his cello every day for 22 days - to honor those 22 who died. This is a very dangerous undertaking since there are snipers everywhere and the streets are not safe for anyone.The second POV is from a character named Arrow. She is a young woman who has a special gift; she is an extraordinary sniper. She has been recruited to help defend the city by some rather mysterious government officials. She goes by the name Arrow because she doesn't want anyone to know her real name and because it is easier for her to kill this way; she isn't herself. Arrow is an honest and seemingly decent young woman who has been put into an impossible moral and physical situation. The chapters with Arrow are some of my favorites of the book.The third character is Kenan. He is the father of three young children and he must go out every 4 days and collect water for his family and for the fussy old woman who lives downstairs. This requires him to go long distances and skirt dangerous sniper fire as well as bombs and other dangers. He remembers a time when he didn't live this way and when they were able to take having clean water and electricity and safety for granted.The last POV character is a 64 year old man named Dragan. He is a baker and under normal circumstances he would be near retirement. As it i,s he is lucky to work at the bakery because he is able to eat. Still, he has to get to the bakery via the dangerous streets of Sarajevo. Dragan lives with his sister and cantankerous brother-in-law because his own place had been destroyed. He sent his wife and son away to Italy just time - before the siege - but now is lonely and wishes he could join them.As we switch from one character to another this book really and truly educates us about what happened during the siege of Sarajevo (from 1992 -1996.) In fact the city itself almost becomes a character as the devastation and the deprivation felt by the people within is brought to life. Whereas the city was once beautiful and thriving and a tourist destination, during the siege it was incredibly dangerous and many people were either killed or suffered because of the lack of food, medication and from the constant explosions and sniper fire.I read this novel for my book club and I'm really glad it was selected. I was surprised by how little I knew about the siege and it was an eye-opening read for me. It's one of those books that you read that truly changes you; you finish it and you're so appreciative of the things that make life easy for us and for the simple fact that we feel safe. We just take those things for granted and it's books like this that remind us of our good fortune and how'd we feel if it all changed.One of the things the author does so well is make us empathize with these characters and ultimately realize that the heroes are not necessarily the ones who are "brave" in battle, but the everyday people who still try to keep their principals and decency during times of great moral and physical crisis.Highly recommended. You can easily read this novel in one sitting and it's a page-turner for sure. It also has one of the best closing lines ever and I was very moved when I turned the last page.

I pretty much loved this book. Taking place during the Bosnian/Serbian conflict, it tells of primarily civilian life in a Sarajevo under siege. The people on whom the book centers lead sad, grim, terrified, and ultimately--at least for these characters--life-affirming lives amid the chaos. To begin with, these lives are limited and pretty tedious, circumscribed by the so difficult-to-achieve needs of daily life and the shells that fall around them and the snipers who shoot from the hills about Sarajevo almost randomly, picking off people trying merely to survive.A catalyst arrives, however, in the form of an old cellist. He has watched from his window as a shell lands amid a crowd of his friends and neighbors lined up simply for bread. Twenty-two people are killed, and the cellist decides that he will stand at the site of the killing for twenty-two days and memorialize these people by playing a specific adagio once each day. He has no idea whether he will survive for this length of time or whether another shell will fall here or a sniper will pick him off, but he decides that acknowledging this portion of lost humanity is more important than his own personal survival. And so he begins.As the other people we are reading about slowly absorb his music, little by little they are reminded, not just of better times, but of better values. Survival alone is not enough for life; something more is required. For example, the family man who spends so much of his time just getting enough fresh water for his family to drink--a very dangerous mission through multiple sniper points--decides that no matter how much more dangerous it will be, he will continue to provide water for his elderly and most unpleasant neighbor as well. The other characters we are following make different but similarly motivated decisions as well. In so doing they endorse, not just life, but human values. And the fact that these decisions are dangerous is brought home to the reader when a favorite character does not survive the decision made.This is a story full of irony and contradiction. Just as the Adagio the cellist plays is a reconstruction of a fragment mostly destroyed in a previous war and possibly not even true to the original, the decisions made are fragmentary returns to different values and most are themselves contradictory. One character chooses to honor life by dignifying the dead. Another chooses death itself rather than the taking of life. The book seems to be saying that a well-lived life is itself dangerous and contradictory.However grim, this is also a beautiful story--one that I highly recommend.