ISBN-10 1594483655
ISBN-13 978-1594483653
Who doesn’t love a story, even a story that here and there is sickening. Steven Galloway has written a captivating story with layers that stir reflection long after the last page has been read. There is nothing particularly new about his theme: war and the way it challenges the humanity of those struggling to survive it. But there is something fresh about the way the author coaxes the reader into the experiences of ordinary people and their struggle to carry out the ordinary events that still demand to be done under the most miserable of circumstances.
Like so many current novels this story about a cellist is light on heroes. The plain characters have a quality of familiarity; while reading about them it seems okay to be a plain reader. They struggle to maintain a thread of meaning in a context of meaninglessness. They do this not because they are heroes, but because they are not ready to die. Barely into the story Galloway introduces us to snipers, whose shots out of nowhere rip into the present and redefine it. Then just as the plot tells us that there is a lull in the sniper’s shots, and just as we are told that the people on the streets are “breathing easier,” the author encourages the reader not to breathe easy quite yet because the “sniper will fire again, though, if not here then somewhere else, and if not him then someone else, and it will all happen again…. “ (p. 33) This is our story and we are in the middle of our own battle.One could say that this tragic story of Sarajevo is dark and grim. Certainly the historic Siege of Sarajevo –the one we now vaguely remember from stories on the news – was grim. And because we can still remember when it happened our own capacity for denial does not work very effectively. We are not allowed to settle back in our chair and read on with the comfort that it is just a story. It was an event. It happened in real time to real people. It makes a difference that we can remember when it happened.
This work of fiction does for us what watching the news cannot do. It forces us to look deeper than the carnage of war. It demands that we face the daunting possibility that in the misery and chaos there is nothing. That life is nothing more than a “series of inconsequential junctions, any or none of which can lead to salvation or disaster.” (p. 82) Once we admit that we cannot escape, however, we stand also before the possibility of staring down the haunt of hopelessness and taking up life, one small thing at a time. And those small things make all the difference. Perhaps that is why we can love a story, especially if it takes us out of our escapes and back into life.
Many contemporary storytellers shy away from admitting the moral message of their writing. Steven Galloway does not. He also does not hesitate to emphasize that the art of writing a good novel is having a good story. It is hard to imagine writing a story about war without making some judgments about the moral challenge of the situation. Without this the writer might be left with little except gore and tragedy. But Steven Galloway also does not batter his reader with judgment, and this is the artistry of his story. He spotlights the issues by opening up the mind of his characters. In an interview about his book Galloway says that one of the opportunities that comes with being a writer is that “you get to be involved in that larger world conversation about what we can do while we’re on this earth."
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For an interesting interview with Steven Galloway see:
