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.

Labels

Labels:

Comments

  1. Ravish ManiAugust 16, 2014 at 9:50 AM

    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. Tomichan MatheikalAugust 16, 2014 at 9:34 PM

      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. Anita SabatAugust 16, 2014 at 11:33 AM

    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. Tomichan MatheikalAugust 16, 2014 at 9:38 PM

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

      Delete
    2. VetirmagalSeptember 8, 2014 at 1:23 PM

      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. UnknownAugust 16, 2014 at 4:04 PM

    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. Tomichan MatheikalAugust 16, 2014 at 9:40 PM

      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. UnknownAugust 18, 2014 at 2:29 PM

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

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ayodhya: Kingdom of Sorrows

T he Sarayu carried more tears than water. Ayodhya was a sad kingdom. Dasaratha was a good king. He upheld dharma – justice and morality – as best as he could. The citizens were apparently happy. Then, one day, it all changed. One person is enough to change the destiny of a whole kingdom. Who was that one person? Some say it was Kaikeyi, one of the three official wives of Dasaratha. Some others say it was Manthara, Kaikeyi’s chief maid. Manthara was a hunchback. She was the caretaker of Kaikeyi right from the latter’s childhood; foster mother, so to say, because Kaikeyi had no mother. The absence of maternal influence can distort a girl child’s personality. With a foster mother like Manthara, the distortion can be really bad. Manthara was cunning, selfish, and morally ambiguous. A severe physical deformity can make one worse than all that. Manthara was as devious and manipulative as a woman could be in a men’s world. Add to that all the jealousy and ambition that insecure peo...
39 comments
Read more

Bharata: The Ascetic King

Bharata is disillusioned yet again. His brother, Rama the ideal man, Maryada Purushottam , is making yet another grotesque demand. Sita Devi has to prove her purity now, years after the Agni Pariksha she arranged for herself long ago in Lanka itself. Now, when she has been living for years far away from Rama with her two sons Luva and Kusha in the paternal care of no less a saint than Valmiki himself! What has happened to Rama? Bharata sits on the bank of the Sarayu with tears welling up in his eyes. Give me an answer, Sarayu, he said. Sarayu accepted Bharata’s tears too. She was used to absorbing tears. How many times has Rama come and sat upon this very same bank and wept too? Life is sorrow, Sarayu muttered to Bharata. Even if you are royal descendants of divinity itself. Rama had brought the children Luva and Kusha to Ayodhya on the day of the Ashvamedha Yagna which he was conducting in order to reaffirm his sovereignty and legitimacy over his kingdom. He didn’t know they w...
30 comments
Read more

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...
16 comments
Read more

Liberated

Fiction - parable Vijay was familiar enough with soil and the stones it turns up to realise that he had struck something rare.   It was a tiny stone, a pitch black speck not larger than the tip of his little finger. It turned up from the intestine of the earth while Vijay was digging a pit for the biogas plant. Anand, the scientist from the village, got the stone analysed in his lab and assured, “It is a rare object.   A compound of carbonic acid and magnesium.” Anand and his fellow scientists believed that it must be a fragment of a meteoroid that hit the earth millions of years ago.   “Very rare indeed,” concluded the scientist. Now, it’s plain commonsense that something that’s very rare indeed must be very valuable too. All the more so if it came from the heavens. So Vijay got the village goldsmith to set it on a gold ring.   Vijay wore the ring proudly on his ring finger. Nobody, in the village, however bothered to pay any homage to Vijay’s...
47 comments
Read more

Dharma and Destiny

  Illustration by Copilot Designer Unwavering adherence to dharma causes much suffering in the Ramayana . Dharma can mean duty, righteousness, and moral order. There are many characters in the Ramayana who stick to their dharma as best as they can and cause much pain to themselves as well as others. Dasharatha sees it as his duty as a ruler (raja-dharma) to uphold truth and justice and hence has to fulfil the promise he made to Kaikeyi and send Rama into exile in spite of the anguish it causes him and many others. Rama accepts the order following his dharma as an obedient son. Sita follows her dharma as a wife and enters the forest along with her husband. The brotherly dharma of Lakshmana makes him leave his own wife and escort Rama and Sita. It’s all not that simple, however. Which dharma makes Rama suspect Sita’s purity, later in Lanka? Which dharma makes him succumb to a societal expectation instead of upholding his personal integrity, still later in Ayodhya? “You were car...
24 comments
Read more