Surviving and Living as a preventative measure

" Dragan doesn't want to go to Italy. He misses his wife and son, but he isn't Italian and he never will be. There is no country he can go to where he won't be from Sarajevo. This is his home, and this is the city he wants to be in. He doesn't want to live under siege for the rest of his life, but to abandon the city to the men on the hills would mean that he would be forever homeless. As long as he's here, and as long as he can keep his fear of death from blinding him to what's left of a world he once loved and could love again, then there's still hope that one day he will be able to walk openly down the streets of this city with his wife and son, sit in a restaurant and eat a meal, browse the windows of shops, free from the men wit guns." [p.161 - Atlantic Books London - 2008]



" [..] civilisation isn't a thing that you build and then there it is, you have it forever. It needs to be built constantly, recreated daily [...] As long as there's war, life is a preventative measure." [p216 - Atlantic Books London - 2008]

Having recently completed reading " The Cellist of Sarajevo", I noticed how the mosaic of emotions, ideas and representations recounted in the novel could be applied to any war torn country but the excerpt from page 161 simply screamed Palestine. I salute the Palestinian people for their steadfastness!

I highly recommend this book, it is gripping, and the best part is that the author, Steven Galloway did not use labels such as Serb, Muslim etc..