Skip to main content

Insanity of War


Book Review

The Cellist of Sarajevo
Author: Steven Galloway
Publisher: Atlantic Books, London, 2008
Pages: 227

War is madness.  It takes human civilisation back to savagery.  It dehumanises people and makes of them cowards that hide themselves in holes like rats or ravenous beasts that ferret out the quivering rats from their holes.  It strips people of their dignity as human beings.  Food and water become scarce commodities.  Famine and diseases replace the zest for living.  Friends become foes.  Hatred spreads like a plague.

Steven Galloway’s novel, The Cellist of Sarajevo, explores the theme of war through the eyes of four persons: Dragan, Kenan, Arrow and a cellist who is taken from the history of the civil war that rocked Sarajevo in the first half of the 1990s.  The disintegration of the former USSR in 1991 led to a brutal civil war that caused almost a quarter of a million deaths, the worst violence in Europe since World War II.    

“At four o’clock in the afternoon on 27 May 1992, during the siege of Sarajevo, several mortar shells stuck a group of people waiting to buy bread behind the market on Vase Miskina,” says Galloway in the Afterword to the novel.  “Twenty-two people were killed and at least seventy were wounded.  For the next twenty-two days Vedran Smailovic, a renowned local cellist, played Albinoni’s Adagio in G Minor at the site in honour of the dead.”

The Cellist is a motif in the novel reminding us constantly of the struggle of human civilisation against savagery, hope against despair, and stoic forbearance against mindless depredation.  Dragan and Kenan are ordinary citizens who witness the war, suffer because of it in many ways and eventually learn to become more human.  Arrow, a woman who has taken up that name symbolically, is a soldier who can shoot very skilfully.  She will kill only the enemy soldiers and not the citizens among the opposite camps.  She refuses to accept the argument of a senior officer who orders her to kill the citizens too: “There are two sides to this war, Arrow.  Ours and theirs.  There is no in-between.”

Is there really no in-between?  There has to be, if humanity is to survive.  Arrow is not a mere killer; she is a soldier who is fighting not out of hatred of the enemy but for love of her people. This is not an easy decision for Arrow.  The temptation to hate is strong for any soldier, for any human being.  Anyone who is not with us is against us: that’s the basic premise in any war.  Hatred is not a specific feeling against specific individuals anymore.  Hatred is now an abstract feeling against a whole community.  War fills us with hatred.

“She didn’t have to be filled with hatred,” Arrow realises.  The music of the Cellist “demanded that she remember this, that she know to a certainty that the world still held the capacity for goodness.”

The other two characters, Kenan and Dragan, too learn the lessons.  The novel is about those lessons that we have to learn if humanity is to survive if not flourish.  “Because civilisation isn’t a thing that you build and then there it is... It needs to be built constantly, recreated daily.”

Arrow is a character from the real history of Sarajevo as is the Cellist.  Galloway has woven a moving tale out of them and the other two imagined characters.  The novel makes us sit up and reflect on the futility of war and hatred.  Why can’t we be more sensible and create a happy world for all of us?  Why do we peddle in hatred so much when we can find much joy in living harmoniously?  Can’t we create a better world for ourselves?


There is no conventional plot in the novel.  Nor is it an experiment in any novel technique.  It presents us a handful of characters and their experiences as well as their self-understanding.  It makes us think deeper about the human situation and its potential for goodness.

Comments

  1. Quite interesting! Today, I too shared an article on war but from different vantage point: Is war always evil? But, as I see, we are talking the same thing - the preservation of humanity and goodness. I'm definitely gonna read it. Thanks Matheikal.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. War is always evil. But it may be inevitable sometimes, like when we are attacked. "Preservation of humanity and goodness" may not necessitate wars at all. I'm more inclined to think that wars are engendered by malign forces.

      Delete
  2. True Sir. Agree with the novel's stress on the futility of War.
    I shared a poem about the same for August 6th...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Just read your post on war and its disasters. Let's hope that more and more people begin to think like us.

      Delete
    2. For more and more people to think like us, the word has to spread?. I find more and more younger ones are going the other uncaring ways. Is it not a fault of the generation , that failed to live by example? I am confused and also upset most of the time.

      Delete
  3. To be honest sir, it is so painful to read about all this.. Sometimes I wonder how will the extinct of human kind be?? Are we going to kill each other or some natural disaster or some virus is going to swipe off our kind?? When there is already so much pain in the world why kill people in the name of war or terrorism???

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The way the world is going, I think we will kill one another. Man-made disasters of all sorts will bring the species to an end, it looks like.

      Delete
  4. Your review makes me want to order it right now. Perhaps I will...

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

India in Modi-Trap

That’s like harnessing a telescope to a Vedic chant and expecting the stars to spin closer. Illustration by Gemini AI A friend forwarded a WhatsApp message written by K Sahadevan, Malayalam writer and social activist. The central theme is a concern for science education and research in India. The writer bemoans the fact that in India science is in a prison conjured up by Narendra Modi. The message shocked me. I hadn’t been aware of many things mentioned therein. Modi is making use of Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan’s Centre for Study and Research in Indology for his nefarious purposes projected as efforts to “preserve and promote classical Indian knowledge systems [IKS]” which include Sanskrit, Ayurveda, Jyotisha (astrology), literature, philosophy, and ancient sciences and technology. The objective is to integrate science with spirituality and cultural values. That’s like harnessing a telescope to a Vedic chant and expecting the stars to spin closer. The IKS curricula have made umpteen r...

Joys of Onam and a reflection

Suppose that the whole universe were to be saved and made perfect and happy forever on just one condition: one single soul must suffer, alone, eternally. Would this be acceptable? Philosopher William James asked that in his 1891 book, The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life . Please think about it once again and answer the question for yourself. You, as well as others, are going to live a life without a tinge of sorrow. Joyful existence. Life in Paradise. The only condition is that one person will take up all the sorrows of the universe on him-/herself and suffer – alone, eternally. What do you say? James’s answer is a firm no . “Not even a god would be justified in setting up such a scheme,” James asserted, knowing too well how the Bible justified a positive answer to his question. “It is expedient that one man should die for the people, so that the nation can be saved” [John 11:50]. Jesus was that one man in the Biblical vision of redemption. I was reading a Malayalam period...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...