I found this to be an incredibly powerful book, one which stayed with me for quite a while after finishing it. I actually read it well before Juliet, Naked, but have only felt able to comment on it now, after careful consideration time.
It is often hard, when you see a catastrophe on the news, to understand how people are feeling and living through that catastrophe. You can empathise with them, and understand that they are suffering a great deal, but the event is so large, and so overwhelmingly different to your every day life, that it is impossible to even try and guess how the people caught up in the middle would be able to get through it. The news is good at giving the background to the conflict: the hows, the whys, the major players, and can give a snapshot or two of what is happening at the current time: a man scurrying across the road under fire, but it cannot tell you what it feels like to be that man.
This book goes some way to attempt to describe the day-to-day scrabble for survival for 3 different people in the ruins of Sarajevo. Their stories are intertwined around the titular cellist, and detail in very simple, stark, language, how they go about surviving while their world crumbles around them. Not only do you get a sense of how difficult simply getting water and bread is, but also how war desensitises and dehumanises all those involved: soldiers and civilians alike.
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