THE WITNESS

A novella focuses on a musician’s life in the beleaguered city of Sarajevo during the Bosnian War.

The siege of Sarajevo in the early 1990s forms the grim, gritty backdrop for this story of love and human endurance. Readers follow professor Jusuf Kurtovic as he navigates the battered city in search of the next day’s provisions, dodging sniper fire, trying not to stare at bloated bodies in the street, and following up on any rumors of fresh bread or drinkable water. Kurtovic is a doggedly optimistic figure, joking with his family—his widowed daughter-in-law, Leila, and his two teenage granddaughters—about breakfast being the most important meal of the day (even though currently it’s mostly composed of powdered eggs and week-old bread). He fills their most depressed moments with the music he was once famous for performing as the principal pianist with the Sarajevo Philharmonic Orchestra. (“Jusuf’s music has become their music, as much a part of their lives as the shelling and the sniper fire.”) Kurtovic, whose wife died of pancreatic cancer, plays the piano in stubborn defiance of daily reality: “He thinks the war has stolen so many people’s identity and dignity and worries that he and the orchestra are no more than a dim memory since the siege has stopped them from performing.” When one day he meets a woman named Sandra Fazlic, who remembers his concerts and finds him charming, he’s suddenly presented with an unexpected chance at love even in the ruins of his beloved city. Groome’s intriguing plot and the story’s compelling characters are finely delineated. The engrossing tale’s inherent pathos—life during the most prolonged city siege in the history of modern warfare, which happened in full view of the world and only ended in 1996—carries most of the story over the novella’s fairly drab delivery. At one point, Kurtovic, who constantly worries about the safety of his Muslim granddaughters, tells Leila: “No one wants to speculate on how long this damn war will last.” The rich details of Sarajevo’s dark realities ground a great deal of the book’s drama—enough to compensate for the slight plodding of the personal narrative.

An emotional and involving tale of a good man in a shattered city.