In an interview, Steven Galloway stated that he chose Sarajevo because he wanted to write about how war affected people for whom war was not their business. Galloway wanted to write about regular everyday citizens who were not soldiers, politicians, or journalists. Galloway chose to base his story in Sarajevo and not an imagined city because he wanted to convey the concrete quality of events like the Siege of Sarajevo as well as the aftereffects and the role of art in society. He wanted to make the ideas in the book seem more real and not suppositional. By choosing a fairly recent event, Galloway could avoid the comment that “times were different then.” Interestingly, Galloway stated that he chose to have three separate main characters to mirror the structure of Albinoni’s adagio. The adagio was built off of a trio sonata, which has three distinct voices working separately, but together the three voices make up a bigger whole. Galloway intended for the three characters to mirror the structure of the trio sonata, and at the same time, the characters voiced one of the three main concerns during the Siege of Sarajevo: food, water, and staying alive.
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
An Interview with Galloway
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It is interesting that Galloway would say that he would want to write a book about three 'normal' citizens that were not soldiers in the war, yet still wrote about a sniper. Although Arrow is not the classical soldier, when discussing the Siege of Sarajevo, the book does not include many of the traditional 'soldiers' only snipers. So in a way, Arrow is the equivalent of a soldier in Sarajevo despite the fact that she is shooting from a distance as opposed to fighting on the front lines.
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