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 Second Crucifixion

  ‘The Second Crucifixion’ is the title of the last chapter of Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins’s magnum opus Freedom at Midnight . The sub-heading is: ‘New Delhi, 30 January 1948’. Seventy-three years ago, on that day, a great soul was shot dead by a man who was driven by the darkness of hatred. Gandhi has just completed his usual prayer session. He had recited a prayer from the Gita:                         For certain is death for the born                         and certain is birth for the dead;                         Therefore over the inevitable                         Thou shalt not grieve . At that time Narayan Apte and Vishnu Karkare were moving to Retiring Room Number 6 at the Old Delhi railway station. They walked like thieves not wishing to be noticed by anyone. The early morning’s winter fog of Delhi gave them the required wrap. They found Nathuram Godse already awake in the retiring room. The three of them sat together and finalised the plot against Gand

The Final Farewell

Book Review “ Death ends life, not a relationship ,” as Mitch Albom put it. That is why, we have so many rituals associated with death. Minakshi Dewan’s book, The Final Farewell [HarperCollins, 2023], is a well-researched book about those rituals. The book starts with an elaborate description of the Sikh rituals associated with death and cremation, before moving on to Islam, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and finally Hinduism. After that, it’s all about the various traditions and related details of Hindu final rites. A few chapters are dedicated to the problems of widows in India, gender discrimination in the last rites, and the problem of unclaimed dead bodies. There is a chapter titled ‘Grieving Widows in Hindi Cinema’ too. Death and its rituals form an unusual theme for a book. Frankly, I don’t find the topic stimulating in any way. Obviously, I didn’t buy this book. It came to me as quite many other books do – for reasons of their own. I read the book finally, having shelv

Vultures and Religion

When vultures become extinct, why should a religion face a threat? “When the vultures died off, they stopped eating the bodies of Zoroastrians…” I was amused as I went on reading the book The Final Farewell by Minakshi Dewan. The book is about how the dead are dealt with by people of different religious persuasions. Dead people are quite useless, unless you love euphemism. Or, as they say, dead people tell no tales. In the end, we are all just stories made by people like the religious woman who wrote the epitaph for her atheist husband: “Here lies an atheist, all dressed up and no place to go.” Zoroastrianism is a religion which converts death into a sordid tale by throwing the corpses of its believers to vultures. Death makes one impure, according to that religion. Well, I always thought, and still do, that life makes one impure. I have the support of Lord Buddha on that. Life is dukkha , said the Enlightened. That is, suffering, dissatisfaction and unease. Death is liberation

Cats and Love

No less a psychologist than Freud said that the “time spent with cats is never wasted.” I find time to spend with cats precisely for that reason. They are not easy to love, particularly if they are the country variety which are not quite tameable, and mine are those. What makes my love affair with my cats special is precisely their unwillingness to befriend me. They’d rather be in their own company. “In ancient time, cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this,” Terry Pratchett says. My cats haven’t, I’m sure. Pratchett knew what he was speaking about because he loved cats which appear frequently in his works. Pratchett’s cats love independence, very unlike dogs. Dogs come when you call them; cats take a message and get back to you as and when they please. I don’t have dogs. But my brother’s dogs visit us – Maggie and me – every evening. We give them something to eat and they love that. They spend time with us after eating. My cats just go away without even a look af