People of the Book + The Cellist Of Sarajevo

[vedderedi]

Between the pages
Brooks' historical novel tells tales of the lives linked to ancient book
By Jenny Shank , Special to the Rocky
Friday, December 28, 2007
Success follows Geraldine Brooks, regardless of her style of writing.


Geraldine Brooks has enjoyed three successful phases of her writing career: first working as a foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal in Bosnia and other war zones, then writing nonfiction books, including 1994's acclaimed Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women, and most recently trying her hand at historical fiction.

She hasn't done so shabbily at it: She won the Pulitzer Prize for her most recent novel, March, an imagining of the life of Louisa May Alcott's father.

Brooks' resume would seem to make her uniquely qualified to tackle the complex subject matter of her new novel, People of the Book. The tale traces the history of one coveted tome, a Jewish prayer book traditionally used during the Passover seder, through time as it travels through war-torn Europe of many eras and influences the lives of the people who create or encounter it.

In April 1996, rare-book conservator Hanna Heath flies into Sarajevo to inspect and repair the Sarajevo Haggadah, which has just turned up after being lost during the war. "The Sarajevo Haggadah, created in medieval Spain," Brooks writes, "was a famous rarity, a lavishly illuminated Hebrew manuscript made at a time when Jewish belief was firmly against illustrations of any kind." In the afterword, Brooks notes that the novel is based on the true story of this Haggadah, though she has fictionalized her account, imagining the book's history.

http://www.rockymountainnews.com/news/2 ... the-pages/

[anais_nin]

i mene zanima

procitah prije par dana slican clanak

Toronto Star
True story of `Sarajevo Haggadah' the basis for Geraldine Brooks' new novel
January 05, 2008
John Freeman
Special to the Star

Geraldine Brooks has gone out on a limb again.

People of the Book, her much-anticipated follow-up to her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel March, retells the story of what happened to the Sarajevo Haggadah – a rare, illuminated 14th-century book used during Passover Seder dinner to tell of the Jews' exodus from Egypt – that disappeared from the city's library during the second Balkan War.

Brooks – neither a believer or a religious scholar – follows the Haggadah backward through time, through its close calls with Nazis and other occupiers, through all the hands that protected it and used it, all the way back to its creator, who was breaking Jewish law to create something so floridly decorated.

Simultaneously, in a near-present-day thread, the novel tells the story of Hanna, a brisk, cool, Australian book conservator, who is called to Sarajevo in 1996 and charged with bringing the damaged codex back to life. Bit by bit Hanna stumbles upon clues about the book's true origin.

Woven together, these two strands make for a kind of literary Da Vinci Code, a book less about the occult mysteries of faith than it is the power books have to bind people together.

"Let's cut to the chase," wrote a critic in the San Francisco Chronicle. "People of the Book is a tour de force that delivers a reverberating lesson gleaned from history."

When asked what exactly that lesson would be, Brooks succinctly responds, "that our societies are at our best and strongest when they do appreciate difference."

As a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, the foreign correspondent turned author became something of a fireman, sent into war zones and famines, from Somalia to Iraq, often with her husband, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Tony Horwitz, reporting along side her, and watched society suffer by not observing this lesson.

After 9/11, however, Brooks found the circumstances for optimism shrunk. "I left just in time," though she adds, "because it got so much nastier. I couldn't believe what happened to Danny Pearl (the Wall Street Journal reporter killed in Pakistan on a routine reporting trip)."

It was during the end of this period that she crossed paths with the klix Sarajevo Haggadah.

"I was covering the UN peacekeeping mission over there," the 52-year-old Australian-born author explains in the New England home she shares with Horwitz.

Sarajevo's library had burned and the Haggadah was missing. "There were all kinds of rumours: that it had been sold and the money used to buy arms, or the Israelis had sent a commando team in to rescue it."

"And then it was disclosed it had been rescued by a Muslim librarian who had gone in during the first days of the way to try and do what he could to save some of the things in the collection that he thought would just be destroyed if the Serbs managed to take the building. He had taken it to the bank and put it in a safe-deposit box."

That's where the book was after the war, when Brooks went and was allowed to sit in on its conservation. Then she learned the book had been rescued in similar fashion from Nazis in World War II. She went back to Sarajevo and learned by chance "that the widow of the real librarian who'd saved the book from the Nazis" some 50 years earlier was still alive. She had a story.

Brooks began People of the Book in earnest but suddenly became stuck in World War II.

She was bailed out by proximity. Brooks was then living in rural Virginia and "the idea for March just flew in the window, gift-wrapped one day," she says.

"I also had a resident Civil War expert," she continues, referring to Horwitz, who wrote a book, Confederates in the Attic, about the way the Civil War lives on in modern-day south. March poured out of her in two years.

Brooks eventually pulled People of the Book out of the drawer at that point and it was much clearer how to proceed, and what to research. In the course of writing the book, she journeyed around the world, to Spain and Austria.

"What attracted me to the story was that this little book was created at a time when people managed to if not love each other at least live side-by-side, learn from each other and enrich each other's cultures."

In many ways, Brooks is the perfect person to tell such a story. As she described in her first book, Foreign Correspondence, a memoir of growing up in suburban Sydney, she was drawn to human dramas, whatever the nationality.

"My games were never of here," she wrote of herself as a child, and her habit of finding pen pals in other parts of the world, from Israel to America, "always of elsewhere."

Her next book, she says, will be set much closer to home and involve another dip into the pastness of the past. For the meantime, however, she is more concerned with present-day America.

This month, Brooks will be on the road explaining why the Sarajevo Haggadah was so significant. She gives a little taste of that pitch when she shows me two replica Haggadah of the book is she writing about.

It is smaller than one would expect, and extraordinarily beautiful, not unlike the illuminated manuscripts of William Blake. Brooks gives a little laugh, like we're looking at a treasure.

It's not something she was born to, nor the deity it speaks of her own. But now, in her most heartening act of total immersion to date, she's about to become one of its most powerful advocates yet.

[vedderedi]

Evo nove recenzije.

'People of the Book': An erudite 'Da Vinci Code'

People of the Book
By Geraldine Brooks

By Susan Kelly, USA TODAY
Geraldine Brooks' novel People of the Book arrives with high expectations. Booksellers are comparing it to The Da Vinci Code and calling it the first literary hit of 2008.

Does Brooks deliver? Yes, and with less flash and more substance than Da Vinci. People of the Book is not as cinematic as Dan Brown's 2003 religious thriller, but Brooks is a skilled storyteller who also casts a spell of intrigue and evil in which demons feign divinity.

But her careful research and the novel's historic underpinnings make it highly unlikely People will face the criticism of factual flaws that dogged Da Vinci.

The titular book is a real one, the Sarajevo Haggadah. The richly illuminated Hebrew text, which recounts the story of Exodus, dates from medieval Spain. For more than 600 years, it was carried across borders and over seas to escape political and religious cataclysms.

The Haggadah came to rest in the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo, and Brooks, who covered the war in Bosnia for The Wall Street Journal, imagines its perilous journey in her third novel.
FIND MORE STORIES IN: Spain | Da Vinci | Hebrew | Sarajevo | Booksellers | Geraldine Brooks | Haggadah

Brooks won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for March, a retelling of Little Women from the perspective of the father who goes off to war. Her first novel, Year of Wonders, about a 17th-century village shrouded by plague, was acclaimed for bringing new luster to historical fiction.

The author says that though People of the Book has its roots in history, much of it is her own invention. Her chief creation is Hanna Heath, an Australian book conservator hired to restore the Haggadah after it survives the shelling of Sarajevo.

As the sardonic Aussie tends the manuscript, she finds klix artifacts — part of an insect's wing, a wine stain, salt crystals and a white hair. Believing they are keys to the book's mysterious past, Hanna takes samples to be analyzed.

Brooks alternates Hanna's account of her work and unraveling personal life with the story of those relics. The insect's wing takes us to Sarajevo at the dawn of World War II as the Nazis steal Jewish treasures.

The wine stain leads to Venice, 1609, where a tormented priest executes a papal order to burn most books written by Jews. The salt takes the story to 1492 and the Hebrew scribe who writes the text on the eve of the Jews' expulsion from Spain.

And finally, the hair harks back to Seville in 1480 and the unmasking of the artist. Hanna's own troubled past and uncertain future dovetail neatly with those of the book as both face betrayal from unexpected sources.

If Brooks becomes the new patron saint of booksellers, she deserves it. The stories of the Sarajevo Haggadah, both factual and fictional, are stirring testaments to the people of many faiths who risked all to save this priceless work.

http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/revi ... book_N.htm

[anais_nin]

ja zbavila knjigu kad procitam, prijavim utiske

[ins]

The New York Times

January 20, 2008
All the World’s a Page
By LISA FUGARD


PEOPLE OF THE BOOK

By Geraldine Brooks.


When Hanna Heath, a manuscript conservator, first touches the centuries-old Hebrew codex known as the Sarajevo Haggadah, she feels a “strange and powerful” sensation, something “between brushing a live wire and stroking the back of a newborn baby’s head.” The manuscript is small, the binding soiled and scuffed, but its lavish illuminations — miniature scenes “as interpreted in the Midrash,” created “at a time when most Jews considered figurative art a violation of the commandments” — are stunning. It’s the spring of 1996 in Sarajevo, and Hanna has been called in to examine the book before it’s put on display.

To understand the work of the craftsmen who created the medieval texts she restores, Hanna has made her own gold leaf and created white pigment by covering lead bars with the dregs of old wine and animal dung. She’s familiar with “the intense red known as worm scarlet ... extracted from tree-dwelling insects” and the blue, “intense as a midsummer sky, obtained from grinding precious lapis lazuli.” Looking closely at the parchment of the Haggadah, she can tell it comes from “the skin of a now-extinct breed of thick-haired Spanish mountain sheep.” These lush details, at once celebratory and elegiac, will appeal to the sort of reader who picks up a book just for the feel of it.

Hanna is opposed to “chemical cleanups” and “heavy restorations,” believing that damage and wear reveal much about how and where a manuscript has been used. “To restore a book to the way it was when it was made is to lack respect for its history,” she tells Ozren Karaman, the Muslim librarian who risked his life to save the Haggadah while Sarajevo was being shelled. During her examination of the manuscript, Hanna finds a fragment of an insect’s wing and a small white hair, which she slips into glassine envelopes for later analysis. These clues and other oddities — where are the book’s clasps? — are the springboard for Geraldine Brooks’s panoramic third novel, “People of the Book.”

Brooks, who won the Pulitzer Prize for her previous novel, “March,” has drawn her inspiration from the real Sarajevo Haggadah. As she explains in an afterword, little is known about this book, except that it has been saved from destruction on at least three occasions: twice by Muslims and once by a Roman Catholic priest. Building on these fragments of information, Brooks has created a fictional history that moves to Sarajevo in 1940, then back to late-19th-century Vienna, 15th-century Venice, Catalonia during the Spanish Inquisition and finally Seville in 1480, the new home of the artist responsible for the Haggadah’s illuminations.

The history of this holy book is a bloody one, bound with brutality and humiliation. Families who protect it are torn apart; the book itself is plundered to pay for a questionable medical cure, then lost in a game of chance. A particularly disturbing scene occurs during the Inquisition in a grotesquely named “place of relaxation” where those accused of heresy by the Spanish authorities are tortured.

Brooks’s extensive research is evident throughout, but she occasionally chokes her storytelling with historical detail; her dialogue can also be heavy with exposition. The narrative works best when the burden of the past is borne more lightly, when Brooks burrows into her characters’ inner lives. In fin-de-siècle Vienna, for example, a syphilitic bookbinder, overcome by symptoms of dementia, forgets how to make tea or even pursue his craft. Terrified, he experiences his thoughts as “an army in retreat, ceding ever more territory to his enemy, the illness.”

An inscription in the real Sarajevo Haggadah reads Revisto per mi. Gio. Domenico Vistorini, 1609. Taken with the notion that a Catholic priest surveying the codex during the Inquisition might choose to save it, Brooks creates another memorable character, an erudite scholar with “an innate reverence for books.” Sometimes, he finds, “the beauty of the Saracens’ fluid calligraphy moved him. Other times, it was the elegant argument of a learned Jew that gave him pause.” This priest haunts the sacristy for draughts of unconsecrated communion wine, intent on obliterating painful memories from his childhood — “the blowing sand of that desolate town,” the secret niche within a carved Madonna — not to mention thoughts of all the texts he has sent to the fires in his 17 years as a censor.

In the intimate first-person narration of the captive artist who creates the book’s original illuminations, a longing for freedom — a theme echoed throughout the Haggadah’s account of the liberation of the Jews — is eloquently evoked. Imagining a walk to the coast, holding an enchanted staff, the artist believes that “the great sea would part, and I would cross it, and make my way, in slow stages, down all the dusty roads that lead toward home.”

These self-contained historical interludes shelter within the overarching and at times problematic story of Hanna Heath. An irreverent Aussie, she’s an appealing character, but as she travels to Vienna, Boston and London, meeting with experts who might help answer her questions about the Haggadah, the structure of the narrative works against her. A chapter that ends with Hanna wondering about the insect wing or the stain will be followed by a historical interlude solving that piece of the puzzle. Not only predictable, this back-and-forth scheme also creates a discrepancy: the reader learns far more than Hanna ever will.

Woven into the puzzle-solving is the account of Hanna’s romance with the Muslim librarian who has saved the book, as well as glimpses of her disastrous and at times melodramatic relationship with her mother. (“How is your latest tatty little book, anyway? Fixed all the dog-eared pages?”) Readers will eventually learn why Dr. Heath, an eminent neurosurgeon, is so dismissive, but this part of the plot has an artificial feel.

We are left wishing Brooks had found a less obtrusive way to gather up the many strands of her narrative. While peering through a microscope at a rime of salt crystals on the manuscript of the Haggadah, Hanna reflects that “the gold beaters, the stone grinders, the scribes, the binders” are “the people I feel most comfortable with. Sometimes in the quiet these people speak to me.” Though the reader’s sense of Hanna’s relationship with the Haggadah rarely deepens to such a level, Geraldine Brooks’s certainly has.

Lisa Fugard has written frequently for The Times’s Travel section and is the author of a novel, “Skinner’s Drift.”

[vedderedi]

The New York Times - Bestsellers
Thursday, January 31, 2008

HARDCOVER FICTION

Top 5 at a Glance
1. PLUM LUCKY, by Janet Evanovich
2. PEOPLE OF THE BOOK, by Geraldine Brooks
3. A THOUSAND SPLENDID SUNS, by Khaled Hosseini
4. BEVERLY HILLS DEAD, by Stuart Woods
5. WORLD WITHOUT END, by Ken Follett

http://www.nytimes.com/pages/books/...ller/index.html

[anais_nin]

Da ne bih otvarala posebnu temu o svakoj knjizi koju neko napise o "nama", nekako mi se cinilo prikladno da dodam informacije o jos jednom knjizevnom djelu na ovu temu o knjizi Geraldine Brooks...

Knjiga kanadskog pisca Steven-a Galloway-a "The cellist of Sarajevo" ce se naci u prodaji 8. aprila.



This brilliant novel with universal resonance tells the story of three people trying to survive in a city rife with the extreme fear of desperate times, and of the sorrowing cellist who plays undaunted in their midst.

One day a shell lands in a bread line and kills twenty-two people as the cellist watches from a window in his flat. He vows to sit in the hollow where the mortar fell and play Albinoni’s Adagio once a day for each of the twenty-two victims. The Adagio had been re-created from a fragment after the only extant score was firebombed in the Dresden Music Library, but the fact that it had been rebuilt by a different composer into something new and worthwhile gives the cellist hope.

Meanwhile, Kenan steels himself for his weekly walk through the dangerous streets to collect water for his family on the other side of town, and Dragan, a man Kenan doesn’t know, tries to make his way towards the source of the free meal he knows is waiting. Both men are almost paralyzed with fear, uncertain when the next shot will land on the bridges or streets they must cross, unwilling to talk to their old friends of what life was once like before divisions were unleashed on their city. Then there is “Arrow,” the pseudonymous name of a gifted female sniper, who is asked to protect the cellist from a hidden shooter who is out to kill him as he plays his memorial to the victims.

In this beautiful and unforgettable novel, Steven Galloway has taken an extraordinary, imaginative leap to create a story that speaks powerfully to the dignity and generosity of the human spirit under extraordinary duress.

[vedderedi]

Evo i ja nadjoh ovu kritiku.

The Cellist Of Sarajevo

Andrew Riemer, reviewer
February 22, 2008

The everyday actions of ordinary men highlight the horrors of civil war.

The Canadian writer Steven Galloway was born in 1975. This is his third novel. In his afterword he identifies the inspiration for this lean and accomplished book. In 1992, not long after the beginning of the siege of Sarajevo, 22 people were killed and scores injured when a mortar shell struck a queue outside a bakery. For the next 22 days, a well-known Sarajevo cellist played a slow, stately piece, usually attributed to the 17th-century Venetian composer Tomaso Albinoni, to commemorate the victims.

That quiet, absorbed act of heroism forms the centrepiece of this fine book. Galloway does not overplay his hand. The cellist is no more than a focus for the three essentially separate narrative strands woven together in this compressed and foreshortened meditation on the horrors of civil war and the plight of people caught in a barbarous world.

Kenan lives in a flat with his wife and children. He has just turned 40 but he already feels like an old man. When we first meet him, he is about to set out on a long and hazardous journey to collect water for his family - and also, somewhat reluctantly, for a cranky old lady downstairs - from a brewery on the opposite side of the river.

Dragan, who is nearly 60, lives with his sister and her husband. Just before the war, he was able to send his wife and son to Italy; he hasn't heard from them for months. He works in a bakery, where he is paid in bread even on those days when he's not rostered for work. Like Kenan, he too sets out on a perilous journey to the other side of the city to collect his wages.

As they weave their separate ways through ruined streets, waiting behind barricades or in a sheltered doorway before plunging across an open space or trying to cross a bridge, always alert to the possibility that snipers in the hills or on the rooftops might have them in their sights, they remember Sarajevo as it used to be before the madness and the hatred: a pleasant, civilised city. Their journeys bring them face to face with horror, mindless brutality and also fleeting moments of compassion.

Galloway reveals considerable skill in the way he allows these ordinary and by no means exceptional men to act as conduits for his larger preoccupations: the insanity of civil war, the barbarism that always accompanies it and the callousness of those who draw handsome profits from suffering and from disrupted lives. Nothing is overstated here and for that reason Kenan's and Dragan's odysseys (or is it calvaries?) prove all the more memorable.

The third strand in the novel is somewhat less assured. This deals with a young woman known only as Arrow, a sharpshooter who has been ordered to safeguard the cellist. It is in these sections that Galloway articulates the ethical puzzles faced by combatants in civil conflicts such as the one that tore Sarajevo apart for almost four years.

I have no doubt that he has considered these issues deeply and sincerely. With Arrow's story - suggested by a broadcast documentary on Danish radio - he is able to expose the corrosive effects of a world in which every individual is reduced to being either one of "them" or one of "us". At the end, Arrow's integrity is unblemished.

There is, nevertheless, something contrived about her story. It is undeniably suspenseful, yet the crisis of conscience she experiences when she is ordered to act in a way contrary to her ethical impulses struck me as somewhat mechanical and predictable. Elsewhere, with Kenan and Dragan, and also with the cellist himself, Galloway is far more successful in presenting such abstract concerns in terms of everyday lives.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/book-reviews ... 62870.html

[valterbranisarajevo]

Baš sam se pitao gdje je sada Vedran?


Muzičar, koji je rizikovao svoj život svirajući Adiago za 22 žrtve masakra, ljut je zbog romana koji je iskoristio njegovu životnu priču, piše David Sharrock u magazinu Times Sarajevski violončelista Vedran Smajlović je muzičar koji je prokosio snajperima, svirajući 22 dana zaredom na mjestu gdje su poginule 22 osobe koje su čekale u redu za hljeb.
Slike muzičara sa tužnim licem, koji svira na izgorenoj stolici obučen u frak, obišle su cijeli svijet i nagnale poznate umjetnike, kao što su David Bowie, U2, Pavarotti i Paul McCartney, da nastupaju zajedno sa njim.

Nakon završetka rata,Smajlović se povukao iz javnog života. Našao je stan u potkrovlju u gradiću između Sjeverne Irske i Republike Irske, gdje provodi dane komponujući muziku i igrajući šah. Smailović je bio zadovoljan svojom sudbinom dok nije otkrio da se roman nazvan “Sarajevski violončelista” nalazi u knjižarama. Roman, kojeg je napisao Steven Galloway, tridesetdvogodišnji Kanađanin koji predaje kreativno pisanje u Vankuveru, pozdravljen je kao remek djelo.

Smajlović je toliko ljut da je zaprijetio da će opet protestovati i spaliti svoje poznato violončelo na mjestu gdje je svirao Albinonijev Adiago tokom 22 dana žalosti i protesta 1992. godine. Izdavačka kuća, Random House, opisuje roman kao “priču o troje ljudi, koji pokušavaju da prežive u gradu ispunjenim ekstremnim strahom beznadežnih vremena, i o tužnom violončelisti koji nezastrašeno svira u njihovoj sredini”. Jedno od troje likova u romanu je žena snajperista “od koje je zatraženo da štiti violončelistu od skrivenog ubice koji ga pokušava ubiti dok svira”.

Roman “Sarajevski violončelista” je na putu da postane svjetski bestseller, a filmska prava su prodana Hollywoodu. Smajlović je prvi put čuo za roman od svog prijatelja u Kanadi, sa kojim je sarađivao na dječijoj basni o njegovom muzičkom protestu.

“Bilo je kao eksplozija atomske bombe, osjećanja gnjeva i boli,” rekao je Smajlović za Times. “Kako je ovo moguće? Ukrali su mi ime i identitet. Niko mi ne može uzeti pravo na to. Jasno je da sam to ja u toj knjizi.”

Prošle sedmice, dok je nastupao na memorijalnom koncertu za britanske vojnike koji su poginuli u Bosni, prijatelji su ga savjetovali su da poduzme zakonsku akciju.

“Očekujem izvinjenje i odštetu za ono što su mi uradili,” izjavio je Smajlović.

U predgovoru romana Galloway kaže da ga je Smajlović “inspirisao da napiše ovaj roman, te da nije temeljio lik violončelista na stvarnom Smajloviću”.

“Još uvijek sam u šoku, Nisam naivan. Ne interesuje me njegova krvava fikcija, interesuje me realnost. Koriste moju sliku i reklamiraju svoj proizvod sa mojim imenom. Uopšte me ne interesuje ovaj projekat,” kaže Smajlović.

“Ja se ne krijem ovdje, ali deset godina nisam želio da izađem. Ne želim više da budem mirotvorac ili javna ličnost. Uradio sam ono što sam uradio, misija je izvršena. Imam pravo na privatnost. Povremeno ću nastupati na dobrotvornim manifestacijama na dobrovoljnoj osnovi, ne želim izlaziti u javnost ali sada sam primoran zbog izlaska ove knjige. Ja nisam svirao 22 dana, ja sam svirao čitav svoj život u Sarajevu, i svaki dan tokom opsade grada,” objašnjava Vedran.

“Stalno govore da sam svirao u četiri sata popodne, ali eksplozija je bila u deset prije podne. Ja nisam glup i nisam gledao da budem pogođen snajperom, te sam mijenjao svoju rutinu. Nisam prestajao svirati muziku tokom opsade. Moje oružje bilo je violončelo. Ali, ukoliko pravda ne bude zadovoljena, vraćam ga nazad u Sarajevo.”

Smajlović se vraća u Sarajevo slijedećeg mjeseca, gdje će učestvovati u snimanju američkog dokumentarnog filma o životu pjevačice Joan Baez. Baez je bila inspirisana da ga posjeti u Sarajevu tokom najžešćih sukoba, akt solidarnosti koji on smatra hrabrijim od njegovih performansa.

Galloway je za Times priznao da je “uznemiren” Smajlovićevom reakcijom, ali smatra da nije uradio ništa loše i da ne duguje ništa Sarajevskom violončelisti.

“Ja sam bio njegov obožavatelj. Ali, nisam potpuno siguran na koji način on smatra da se ono što sam ja uradio sa njegovim identitetom razlikuje od ostalih umjetničkih djela koje je on inspirisao. Ne koristim njegovo ime. Svog lika u romanu zovem violončelista i on je stvarno samo lik na prvih pet stranica. Priča nije o njemu, nego o ostalim likovima i njihovim reakcijama na ono što on radi. Znam odakle on dolazi, ali bih volio da pročita knjigu. Ja ga nisam kontaktirao dok sam pisao knjigu jer likovi nemaju kontakt sa violončelistom, te im stoga stvarno nije važno šta on radi,” kaže Galloway.

“Problem je što je gospodin Smajlović uzeo violončelo i ponio ga na ulicu u ratu, i to je javno djelo. Ja ne mogu to ignorirati kao umjetnik. Ja ne mislim da sam prešao bilo kakvu crtu zbog pisanja izmišljenih stvari o živoj osobi. Većinu stvari sam pokupio sa Interneta,” dodaje autor knjige.

Ali, Galloway je bio upozoren o mogućoj reakciji Smajlovića na knjigu. Deryk Houston, multimedijalni umjetnik koji živi blizu Gallowaya u Britanskoj Kolumbiji, izjavio je za Times da je rekao Gallowayu da je trebao biti otvoren sa violončelistom od samog početka projekta.
“Mislim da ga je trebao kontaktirati u samim počecima projekta. Iako nema zakonske obaveze, mislim da je trebao Vedranu ponuditi neku vrstu finansijskog aranžmana.

Houston je opisao autora knjige kao “vrlo prijatnog mladog čovjeka”, ali je dodao da je Galloway u ovom slučaju vjerovatno pogriješio zbog svoje mladosti ili zbog toga što su ga ljudi oko njega loše savjetovali.

Međutim, Galloway je izjavio da Houstonova sugestija da plati Smajloviću nema smisla:

“Ne vidim kako pisci knjiga fikcije mogu plaćati svoje izvore inspiracije. Ukoliko bi to uradio, postao bi odmetnik u književnosti. Ne znam čak da li mu išta dugujem u finansijskom smislu. Šta je sa 25 ljudi koje sam intervjuisao i čije su priče u knjizi? Da li i njima trebam platiti? Kako ovo riješiti? Nikad nisam razmišljao da ću od Vedrana Smajlovića stvoriti neprijatelja. Mislio sam samo da postoji mogućnost da mu se neće svidjeti knjiga.”

Prevod: Enis Zebić
(Ovaj tekst objavljen je u magazinu “Times”, 06.07.2008)

Slobodna Evropa

[melb26sa]

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/ ... 083037.ece