The Cellist of Sarajevo - CanLit Reservations

The Cellist of Sarajevo

CanLit Reservations: Although I am a passionate reader and promoter of CanLit, have read almost nothing but for over forty years, for some probably ignoble reasons I have previously avoided this novel, Steven Galloway's The Cellist of Sarajevo. For (1) reason, because Vancouver Island artists Elizabeth Wellburn and Deryk Houston had earlier collaborated with the cellist Vedran Smailovic to create the illustrated children's book Echoes from the Square (Rubicon, 2002). A version is available on You Tube. (2) For another reason, I always suspect ulterior motives (a quest for $$$ and international sales) behind "Canadian" novels set elsewhere, with not even one Canadian character. I hold with Seamus Heaney that good literature reveals the self to the self, restores the culture to itself. (Of course, I'm paraphrasing abducting expanding what he said about poetry in "Feeling into Words".) Who will write about us, reveal us and our culture, if not us? We need to do this. (3) And finally, because looking outside ourselves for examples of human rights abuses could imply a "holier than thou" attitude, a blindness to our own failures. I know, we have a shared humanity, and that it is often easier to recognize problems in others before we see them in ourselves. I said my hesitations are ungenerous.