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True Lies
Fired by imagination, not politics, Steven
Galloway’s acclaimed new novel explores intertwined
lives in a city under siege
By John Burns
In the middle of the morning on May 27, 1992, Vaso Miskin
Street, just down the way from Sarajevo’s downtown
cathedral, exploded. Twenty-two civilians, in a lineup
to buy bread, were killed. Steven Galloway, a 32-year-old
UBC creative writing instructor with no connection to
the former Yugoslavia, is not at first blush a likely
candidate to tell the story of Vaso Miskin Street; or
of the noted cellist Vedran Smailovic, who marked those
deaths with 22 daily performances; or even of the three
characters—a father whose family has fled, another
whose family has stayed, and a female sniper with ethical
concerns—who animate his immaculately constructed,
tautly written, and utterly engrossing third novel,
The Cellist of Sarajevo.
Galloway’s previous novels couldn’t be more
unlike Cellist in subject matter or accomplishment.
Finnie Walsh is a good-hearted story about small-town
hockey that was Galloway’s undergraduate thesis
in the creative writing program at UBC; Ascension is
a tale of Romany circus artists in the 1970s that received
critical attention but sold sluggishly. “As far
as writers go, I’m on the sort of extreme end,”
Galloway says over lunch. There are writers who base
characters on friends, acquaintances, and themselves,
he explains; and then there are those who avoid the
personal. “I’m obviously in the latter category.
But even within the latter category, I like to write,
it seems, specifically about things that I have zero
experiential connection with. Like a circus, or being
a Gypsy, or war. Things that I know I will never know
fascinate me.”
Sarajevo under siege, as imagined by Galloway, is about
to fascinate a great many other people as well. His
agents—Henry Dunow in Manhattan and Michael Hayward
in Melbourne—have sold the novel in 16 countries
(and counting) for almost a million dollars in nonrefundable
advances, and Galloway and his wife, Lara, have bought
a century-old house in New Westminster with the proceeds.
The book has been embraced by Nobel winner J.M. Coetzee,
the Barnes & Noble Discover program, and Chapters
Indigo principal Heather Reisman. A number of producers
are involved in talks to option Cellist for film.
So what business does a Vancouver writer have taking
on a war that raged halfway around the globe while he
was still in high school? Faultlessly polite and generous
(if compulsively sardonic), Galloway shrugs: “I
don’t write about the worlds that I live in. I
don’t write about being a 32-year-old father of
two living in Vancouver with no job. That would be fascinating!
Oh, the plot points! ‘Should I feed the fish now,
or wait an hour?’ ” Long pause. “I’m
probably the worst person to ask about why I do anything.
“I don’t feel like any of this is exotic,”
he adds. “I feel more exotic in New York or Toronto
than I do in Sarajevo. Sarajevo just feels like an ordinary
kind of town. Why wouldn’t it be? It’s just
a city.
I don’t understand what anyone says to me there”—he
spent three weeks in Sarajevo doing research—“but
beyond that, it’s just buildings and people. Tasty
food. What’s not to like?”
In their trajectories, Gallo-way’s principal characters
navigate a series of small, telling moments that make
the siege as familiar as the tragedies that befall any
of us. Their struggles condense into the most ordinary
decisions: how to cross a street, which signs to heed,
who to trust. Life under bombardment is no different
from life in this blessedly peaceful city: for us all,
decency hinges on how we respond to the situations we
face. It’s just that Vancouver lacks the drama
and the detonation of the Bosnian civil war.
“It’s kind of the beauty and also the tragedy
of living in the West,” Galloway says. “Aside
from having a homeless person ask you for money, or
the odd small acts of charity, you’re never really
put in a moral situation where what you do is going
to affect anyone else’s life that majorly or be
a major test of your own humanity. It’s more like
a series of tiny decisions that will make you a moral
person or an immoral one.”
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