The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway came to me well-recommended. When I say came to me I mean just that – the book arrived by mail. I had asked for recommendations and here one arrived at my doorstep.

I asked for recommendations in an effort to read some books I might not otherwise read. That seemed like a reasonable strategy at the time. Yet when the book arrived, for some reason I don’t understand, I avoided reading it. And I continued to avoid reading it for some time.

Then one recent day I needed a book to read. I was about to go out to the 27th Street book box and shop, but my eyes fell on The Cellist of Sarajevo. Ah, I should read this one now. Then I remembered, oh yeah I don’t care for books set in wars any more than I care for war movies. Maybe that’s why I’ve been avoiding it.

I picked it up and flipped through it. OK, I’ll read the first chapter. OK, well I’ll give it one more chapter. And one more. At that point Mr. Galloway had sucked me right into this strange world, Sarajevo under seige, her inhabitants targets for shells and snipers.

What is bravery, what is cowardice? How would you behave? How would the situation change you? What happens to the human spirit in the face of senseless, arbitrary death and the destruction? The horror of the situation is humanized through the eyes of three characters, four if you count the cellist. Two are simply trying to survive, trying to cope. A third – Arrow – is a sniper. She works more or less on her own and picks off the soldiers in the hills, soldiers who are at the same time trying to target her. The Cellist hauls his instrument into the street and plays for 22 days, one day for each of the victims of a senseless massacre of people lined up for some bread.

Galloway doesn’t tell us much about the warring sides, the factions, who did what to whom. To his characters, there are only people in the city – targets – men in the hills, and some gangsters and their money thrown into the mix. We don’t learn much about the complexities of the conflict, nor about the ethnicity or religion of the combatants. Galloway strips all that down to the bone and puts us into this strange fishbowl with his characters.

Good book. Good read.