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True Lies — Page 3
One person who likely won’t be buying The Cellist
of Sarajevo is Stephen Harper.
Or if he does, he won’t be telling Yann Martel,
who sent the prime minister an advance copy of Galloway’s
book as part of his “What Is Stephen Harper Reading?”
program. “A grand and powerful novel about how
people retain or reclaim their humanity when they are
under extreme duress,” Martel wrote in an accompanying
letter to Harper, Cellist “transports you to a
situation that might be alien to you, makes it familiar,
and so brings understanding.”
Speaking from his home in Saskatoon, Martel (who won
the Man Booker Prize for The Life of Pi) calls Cellist
“a morally accurate” book. “The danger
could have been to talk about the sultry weather or
the history of the Ottoman Empire,” says Martel.
“It could have tried to guide us through a story
by dint of emphasizing the exoticism. The book I’d
sent the previous time was [Northrop Frye’s] The
Educated Imagination. And Galloway’s novel is
a perfect example of what the imagination can do. It
can show you a galaxy. It flexes the imagination by
showing you different kinds of reality. And by going
through that exercise, you come to realize which realities
you want and which you don’t.”
With Ascension and now Cellist, has Galloway found his
niche as a chronicler of the marginalized of Central
Europe? “I think probably not,” says his
New York agent, Henry Dunow. “This will be his
Sarajevo novel. And based on his work to this point,
Steven is one of those writers who doesn’t repeat
himself.”
“That’s why I think he’s going to
be a very interesting writer,” says McCall Smith.
“Because he’s got this great imagination,
and he’s prepared to let it rip. I can see him
becoming a very, very good and important writer. I really
think there’s that particular imaginative quality.
It’s not contrived; it’s real in his case.”
Galloway, a grand believer in the glass half empty,
is quick to advance the counterview: “The one
drawback for me as a writer for publishers is that you
don’t know what you’re going to get one
book to the next, right? You can be pretty sure I don’t
intend to do that [a Sarajevo novel] next time—partly
because I get bored, and partly just to prove them all
wrong. I don’t even know what I’m going
to do next. Who does?”
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