Music for a broken city

Steven Galloway is the author of the new novel The Cellist of Sarajevo. (Lee Henderson/Random House)

Like Advil, Canadian literary fame comes in a variety of strengths. There are the institutions, authors whose celebrity has taken on a life outside the printed word — think Margaret Atwood, whose crown of grey curls and Mona Lisa smile are familiar even to people who’ve never read the skewed sci-fi of Oryx and Crake. Then there are the stalwarts, the Rohinton Mistrys and M.G. Vassanjis — as well read as they are reviewed, their personal fame hasn’t yet eclipsed that of their books. Finally, there’s the writer’s writer, who is well regarded within the book world, but relatively unknown outside.

Until recently, Steven Galloway was a prime example of the latter. While his first two books, Finnie Walsh and Ascension, got good reviews, he remained a well-kept secret to all but the most intrepid literary explorers. But Galloway’s just-released third novel, The Cellist of Sarajevo, already has critics’ keyboards fluttering with synonyms for “moving” and “humane.” International suitors haven’t been far behind; Galloway has sold foreign rights in 18 countries for an advance of almost $1 million.

It’s not hard to guess why The Cellist of Sarajevo has garnered so much attention. A timely take on how people behave during war, it’s book club catnip — well written and emotionally redeeming. Set during the siege of Sarajevo in the mid-1990s, the novel recounts in spare prose the struggles of three of the city’s inhabitants: a female sniper who calls herself Arrow; Kenan, a father on a trip to get water for his family and a cantankerous neighbour; and Dragan, a baker on his way to work. Connecting them is the cellist, who plays each afternoon in a crater left by a mortar shell in front of his building. In this spot, 22 people were killed while waiting to buy bread. In commemoration, the musician promises to put bow to string for as many days as there were victims.

While media coverage of the conflict was loaded with identifiers like “Muslim,” “Serb,” “Croat” and “Bosnian,” Galloway purposely avoided using any ethnic or religious labels in The Cellist of Sarajevo. The main characters are simply referred to as Sarajevans, their common enemy described only as “the men on the hills.”

As with any good work of art about war, the perils come as much from inner demons as outer ones. Arrow is secretly sent to guard the cellist; perched in a sniper’s aerie in a bombed-out building, circumstances force her to re-evaluate her hatred for the cities’ enemies. While dragging makeshift canteens to one of the city’s few sources of clean water, Kenan tries to decide whether he’s going to return home with water for the elderly, ungrateful Mrs. Ristovski. (Picture a childless version of Principal Skinner’s mother on The Simpsons.) Dragan, for his part, has to master his fear and maintain a semblance of civility as he crosses a city he no longer recognizes as his own.

In a phone interview from his home in New Westminster, B.C., Galloway is warmly funny and self-effacing, kind of like your favourite English teacher. In a way, he is: he teaches creative writing part time at Simon Fraser University and the University of British Columbia. “I really wanted to write a book about what high-pressure, wartime situations do to ordinary people — not professional soldiers, or generals or politicians,” he says.

(Random House)

While the novel is centred on the conflict in Sarajevo, it’s also a book about art. As Galloway writes, the cellist’s music “wouldn’t bring anyone back from the dead, wouldn’t feed anyone, wouldn’t replace one brick.” Yet it still has the ability to help heal a battered city — if not physically, then mentally.

“We have a tendency,” Galloway says, “in North America in particular to view art as a luxury item, things like music or books as almost a frivolity. But the way Europeans look at it, and kind of the way I look at it, is that one of the points of art and music is to remind us of our innate humanity.” (If your own humanity could use a boost, it’s worth seeking out the piece the cellist plays each afternoon, the haunting, stately Adagio in G Minor.) Life of Pi author Yann Martel must be hoping The Cellist of Sarajevo will tap some hidden artistic sympathies in our prime minister. The novelist has been mailing Stephen Harper books for the last year as a sort of combination art project and political protest, and recently sent him a pre-release version of Galloway’s book. The response so far from the PM has been stony silence. However, Galloway’s publisher, Knopf, repurposed bits of Martel’s missive for a book-jacket blurb. (“Hey,” says Galloway, “all I want to do is not get audited out of this.”)

While the book is inspired by the story of a real cellist — who played during the siege, dressed in a tuxedo — the novel primes readers with a warning that it’s “above all else a work of fiction.”

“I think we are as a society, in terms of how we approach books and movies, a little too concerned with whether something actually happened or not,” says Galloway. “I didn’t want people approaching this book as though all these things actually happened. Many of them did, but I didn’t want reviewers and readers reading through it looking for historical accuracy.”

Still, Galloway was careful about his research, and much of what happens in Cellist came from conversations with Sarajevans, both in Canada and in what is now Bosnia-Herzegovina. He made sure, though, not to visit Sarajevo until he’d done the bulk of the writing. “I’ve discovered on past projects that if I go to a place cold, when I get back, I realize that I didn’t find out any of the things that I need to know.” Mostly, he says, “I wanted to walk through my own book and see if it was actually possible to do.” There were other perils, including the Sarajevan custom of welcoming visitors with several cups of what Galloway describes as “the strongest coffee that has ever existed,” followed by a few shots of plum brandy. For Galloway, a day filled with seven or eight visits inevitably resulted in an unpleasant combination of jitters and spins.

Soon, those Sarajevans will be able to read the book in their own language — Bosnian rights for The Cellist of Sarajevo have just been sold. They’ll join a host of other editions in translation. “It’s been really exciting,” says Galloway. “But foreign editions are a strange thing — you get this book that has your name on it that you can’t read. And you assume that the words in it are more or less what you wrote, but you don’t really know.”

The Cellist of Sarajevo is published by Knopf and is in stores now.

Gillian Grace is a Toronto-based editor and writer.

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