North of the Mediterranean Sea, a capital was under siege in the early 1990s. In this city—Sarajevo—a local cellist, Vedran Smailovic, played a musical piece called “Albinoni’s Adagio”. He played this musicHeHe played the music in hon in honor of some innocent civilians who died during the siege. These facts are used by a Canadian author, Steven Galloway, for the setting of the historical novel, The Cellist of Sarajevo.

            In the beginning of this novel, a cellist paralleling Smailovic plays the reconstructed “Adagio” on the street where his friends and neighbors were mortared. He decides to “do this every day for twenty-two days, a day for each person killed”. Even though the cellist risks his life in honor of the dead people, he is not the protagonist of the novel.

            Then who is the protagonist? There are three of them. The first one is a sniper called Arrow. Similar to her name, her life is a “weapon”: skillful and obedient with no choice but to kill. Arrow is not her real name; she makes her own persona with a different personality. The book states that before she made her persona, she ‘hated nobody’, but now Arrow does hate “men of the hill”. However, she lives as her persona to survive in a tough situation like war.

            Kenan also lives during this siege. Even though he lives in this unpleasant and depressing time, he strives to at least stay alive because he has a family who depends on him. Later however, he recognizes that he lived like a “ghost”, someone with no hope so exists but in fact dead. Kenan contemplates about this part of his lifestyle if he should hope for the bombardments’ to end or for life as the “ghost”.

            The last protagonist, Dragan, also has a family, but they fled to Italy before the conflict began. This lonely character “doesn’t want to encounter anyone”. By avoiding people whom he knew from before the siege, he lives in an “asleep” state. Similar to a sleeping person who can ignore the truth; Dragan ignores Sarajevo’s reality not looking forward to the end of the siege.

            For an entertaining description of these three protagonists, the author utilizes a literary device called temporal distortion. By this effect, the characters are introduced during different times of the siege. However, each character’s story ends on the same day or the moment—“four o’clock”—the time when the Cellist will play the “Adagio” for the last time. Except for Arrow who ends a bit later. As the protagonists start at different times but end at similar time, the amount of each character’s detail varies.

Another effect is shift in point of view—the change of character’s perspective given by the narrator. In this novel, Galloway shifts the point of view when a new chapter starts. At first, the utilization of this device was confusing when a new person was introduced. Later, when the earlier person’s story was continued, recalling the previous event was difficult. However when the changes were not overwhelming, shift in point of view assists to an engaging revelation of each protagonist’s thoughts and emotions.

Above all, the author’s constant use of flashbacks to recall character’s past decreased the understandability of the plot. When Galloway utilizes transitions as “ten years ago”, recognizing the flashback was not hard. However, some flashbacks did not have transitions or clear transitions to indicate the change of time so added to uncertainty.

Even though there were some confusing elements in the novel, the three protagonists’ insights of various life-aspects created the reason to continue reading. As the characters has hard times, they bump into questions like “[Is it] worse to be killed or wounded?”, and should hatred be based on one’s identity or actions? These questions made the novel profound and captivating.