
This novel, a bit
over 230 pages, is packed with an intensity I relish in a good read. The novel is set at the height of the War in
Sarajevo. The city is in ruins, and
mortar shells rain down and snipers seem to be around every corner. The novel opens with, “It screamed downward,
splitting air and sky without effort. A
target expanded in size, brought into focus by time and velocity. There was a moment before impact that was the
last instant of things as they were.
Then the visible world exploded. // In 1945, an Italian musicologists
found four bars of a sonata’s base line in the rubble of the firebombed Dresden
Music Library. He believed these were
the work of the 17th century Venetian composer Tomaso Albinoni and
spent the next 12 years reconstructing a larger piece from the charred
manuscript fragment” (xv). According to
this introduction, scholars are divided over the authenticity of the
piece. We know it today as “Albinoni’s
Adagio,” music of sublime and moving beauty.
Four main characters
weave tales of the terrible destruction of Sarajevo. Kenan, a man trying to keep his family and
friends with enough water; Dragan, a soldier directing the defense of the city;
Arrow is a young woman who has been recruited as a sniper; and a musician known
only as “The cellist.” When a surprise
mortar attack kills 22 people lined up for bread, the Cellist begins playing
the Adagio for twenty-two days—one for each of the 22 people who died. Arrow is assigned to protect the
cellist. Galloway writes, ‘[Arrow]
reaches down and picks up a small piece of glass. Glass is disappearing from the city. […]
One pane at a time the windows through which people see the world are
vanishing. // This is how she now believes life happens. One small thing at a time. A series of inconsequential junctions, any or
none of which can lead to salvation or disaster” (82).

Kenan lives in his
apartment with his wife Amila, and he must travel every day for water. Galloway writes, “Another day has just
begun. Light streams its way into the
apartment, where it finds Kenan in his kitchen, his hand reaching for the
plastic jug containing his family’s final quarter-liter of water. His movement is slow and stiff. […]
Like him, [Amila’s] middle age has somehow escaped her. She’s barely thirty-seven but looks well over
fifty. Her hair is thin and her skin hangs
loose off her flesh, suggesting a former woman, who, Kenan knows, never was”
(13).
--Chiron, 4/15/18
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