On 27 May 1992 a mortar attack on Sarajevo killed 22 people in Vase Miskina, a market place. For 22 days, starting on 28 May Vedran Smailovic, a ce... (show more)
On 27 May 1992 a mortar attack on Sarajevo killed 22 people in Vase Miskina, a market place. For 22 days, starting on 28 May Vedran Smailovic, a cellist, played Albinoni's Adagio in G Minor (aka Adagio for organ and strings) at the spot where the motar fell. Also during the siege, a woman sniper named Strijela (Arrow) was interviewed on Radio Denmark. This much is true - and out of these truths Steven Galloway has constructed a beautiful, moving, make-me-weep-in-public, tale of survival, defiance, and the retention and rediscovery of humanity and beauty in the midst of one of the great war crimes of 20th century Europe. Yugoslavia's bitter civil war in the early 1990s, the seige of Sarajevo, the destruction of Mostar's bridge and other cultural treasures, the genocide and 'ethnic cleansing', remains one of contemporary Europe's scars that has torn apart one of its finest examples of multi-ethnic existence. The perpetrators on all sides of the crimes are being brought to book, although Radko Mladic remains at large - we can but hope.
In this book the University shooting club sharpshooter turned sniper Arrow is assigned to protect the cellist from the snipers the 'men in the hills' send to undermine this recreation of humanity, this cultural resistance (that he played the Adagio in G Minor is telling - not only is a beautiful mournful piece, it was mostly destroyed in the fire bombing of Dresden in February 1945 and later reconstructed by an Italian musicologist, so is often credited to Albinoni & Giazotto), this sheer bravery. Although the two moments of climax of her story as a sniper - her doubt and her humanity - are the dramatic highpoints of the novel, perhaps the most beautiful is the section where Kenan (at the centre of one of the three autonomous narratives) finds himself unexpectedly in Vase Miskina when the cellist is playing, and the city is restored - at least for the moment, until he stops. The tales of Kenan and of Dragan are in some ways more powerfiul - two men, non-combatants, struggling to stay alive: Kenan by performing neighbourly acts for his grumpy, misanthropist, ungrateful neighbour; Dragan, who finds rejuvenated life by walking, not running, across an intersection where others have been shot that day. They are all small moments, but they carry the humanity the seige threatened. (I've never lived in a seige and hope I never do - but I have lived in a police state that sought to dehumanise most of its inhabitants: this seemed powerfully realistic.)
A few years ago Facebook friend Rupert (OK, my son) was part of a small group who staged a play called Sniper (in Wellington, New Zealand) centred on this war. They made the audience part of the play, and made them select who lived, and who died; who stood by when the crimes were committed and who intervened, and made the audience confront the thin line between hope from a distance that we'd remain human and the prospect that in the midst of it all we wouldn't. I doubt that it will ever be staged again. But, like this book it was a fine moment of political humanism.
Towards the end of last year (2008) the Guardian carried a series of statements by major British publishers about the books they wished they'd published. One, I forget which, listed this as the only one. I didn't read this as arrogance about their 2008 list - but about the quality of this. Read it, it is qute simply stunning.
Oh, and note the epigraph from Trotsky - "You may not be interested in war - but war is interested in you".
Smailovic now lives in Northern Ireland - ironic or poetic? (show less)
