Steven Galloway’s The Cellist of Sarajevo has been selected as the Toronto Public Library’s One Book community read for 2014.
The stirring novel, originally published in 2008, tells the story of three civilians trying to survive the bloody siege of Sarajevo in the 1990s, and the cellist who makes the dangerous decision to play Albinoni’s Adagio each day for 22 days as a way of honouring the victims of a bakery bombing. Book lovers are encouraged to pick up a copy and read it ahead of the annual Keep Toronto Reading Festival in April. The book will be discussed at various events across the city over the course of the festival.
In a conversation with Cityline.ca, Galloway explained that he began writing the book in 2003 in response to the post-9/11 debate about the merits of war.
“What really bothered me at the time about the large discussion that was taking place was [the focus on] whether people were for the war or against the war or the idea of war. Not much of the conversation was about how, in contemporary warfare, 90-95% of all casualties are civilian,” he notes. “They’re not soldiers, they’re butchers, bakers, schoolteachers, housewives, the retired, the young. That just wasn’t part of what we were talking about. We weren’t saying, ‘To get rid of these bad guys, is it worth killing 10 innocent people for every one bad person?’ That stuck in my craw.”
The book’s titular cellist is inspired by a real life musician who played his instrument amid the destruction during the siege, but the story itself focuses on three individuals in the city who are in one way or another affected by his actions.
“When you look at that image [of the cellist playing], there’s a spectrum of possible reactions. On one end of the spectrum, there’s [the view that] this guy’s an idiot. He’s going to get shot. It’s a stupid and melodramatic, grandiose thing to do,” Galloway says. “On the other end of the spectrum, [there’s the view that] this is one of the most poignant and moving expressions of humanity that I’ve ever seen. And then a range of possible variations in between those two poles. What you can’t do, I don’t think, is look at that image and ‘nothing’ it.
“To me the question of the book is: How will the struggles these three fictional characters are already having be influenced, or not influenced, by this image?”
Galloway’s latest novel, The Confabulist, will be published in April. In it, the author sets his sights on legendary magician Harry Houdini and the cast of intriguing characters in his life. It’s a change of pace from Cellist, but Galloway – who teaches creative writing at the University of British Columbia – says it’s important to push the limits of your craft.
“The best advice I was given as a young writer was not to be afraid of failure. If you just keep doing what you’re good at, and don’t do the things you suspect you’re not good at, you kind of stagnate as a writer. You run out of stories you can tell, and you don’t get better,” he says. “What I try to get my students to do is figure out what it is [they] can do, and then try to add something that [they] can’t do into it. If you fail, no one gets hurt. It’s writing.”
The Keep Toronto Reading Festival runs from April 1-30 at venues across the city. For more information, visit www.keeptorontoreading.ca.