siege of Sarajevo tagged posts

To Save a Country, a Culture, a World : Steven Galloway’s “The Cellist of Sarajevo”

Is it possible to kill a city, just wipe out its entire identity and reason for existence, to so decimate its population and dampen its spirit that its surviving inhabitants no longer know who they are, whom to trust and what they care about—or whether they care about anything at all?

To render it, through relentless bombardment, disrupted supplies of food, water and electricity, and concentrated but unpredictable sniper fire from the hills high above, a mere ghost of its once living self, starved of the essential human nutrients of care, security, and community that make a city not just an infrastructure of buildings and roads and utilities, but a place of identity and soul?

These are the underlying macro questions that Steven Galloway explores in his riveting 2008 novel, “The Cellist of Sarajevo.”

Profound because to insist on beauty even amidst ongoing atrocity is a radical act of freedom and resolve ...

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