I didn’t know anything about the Siege of Sarajevo. I had heard vaguely of the Bosnian War and remember President Clinton getting America involved, some said too late. But I had no idea that for years — YEARS, from April of 1992 until February of 1996 — the army surrounded the city of Sarajevo and bombed the crap out of it. Bombed civilians. Intentionally. Snipers sat in the hills and picked off citizens, regular people going to work or to buy food, when food was available. I didn’t know anything about the Siege of Sarajevo until I read this beautiful, graceful, intelligent and touching book, which follows the experiences of three different citizens of the city at an undefined time during the siege.

The title character, the cellist, was a real person. He truly did witness a mortar attack on a group of people trying to buy bread, 22 of whom were killed. He really did set up his cello in the street and play Albinoni’s Adagio for 22 days in honor of the dead. Our three main characters — a female sniper, a father trekking across the city to find water and a baker on his way to work — spiral around the tale of this cellist, this crazy musician who makes himself a daily target, this man who somehow expresses what they all need to hear.

A small decision. Nothing to think about. You’re hungry, and come to this place where maybe they will have some bread to buy. Of all the places to go, you come here. Of all the days to come, a particular one chooses you. At four o’clock in the afternoon. It’s just something you do because life is a series of tiny, unavoidable decisions. And then some men on the hills send a bomb through the air to kill you. For them, it was probably just one more bomb in a day of many. Not notable at all.

She reaches down and picks up a small piece of glass. Glass is disappearing from the city. It’s either blown up or removed to prevent it from becoming a projectile when it inevitably is blown up. One pane at a time the windows through which people see the world are vanishing.

This is how she now believes life happens. One small thing at a time. A series of inconsequential junctions, any or none of which can lead to salvation or disaster. There are no grand moments where a person does or does not perform the act that defines their humanity. There are only moments that appear, briefly, to be this way.

It amazing how much humans can adapt, how much they can take and still survive, how quickly we can all revert to a primitve subsistence existence. And it’s amazing to me that this travesty happened. In the 1990s, not the 16th century. The image of people huddled against a brick wall, steeling themselves for a quick dash across an exposed intersection, where a dead man lays sprawled with a sniper bullet in his head: That picture is going to haunt me for the rest of my life, as will Galloway’s spare yet evocative writing style. He’s a writer that makes you feel as if his story was always true, was always there, floating invisibly in space. He simply plucked the words from the air and captured them between two covers.

Please, pick up this tiny novel and open your heart to it. It’s one of the best books I’ve read in years.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars – Buy the hardcover