My eye was caught today by this story from The Times about 'the cellist of Sarajevo', who is extremely upset by a novel called, er, The Cellist of Sarajevo. The author, Steven Galloway, raises some interesting points in the article about how to draw the line between fiction and reality, eg whether you have to pay off the latter if creating the former. (His book raises even more interesting questions about this. I am in the middle of it at the moment and feel, so far, that it straddles both fiction and reality, therefore satisfies entirely as neither.)
But what excellent publicity...
3 comments:
Even in the course of one article, Galloway manages to come across as a bit of a twerp -- naive and arrogant by turns. It doesn't help that he seems to have a habit of referring to himself as an artist in a way that makes one think he is about to have an attack of the vapours and reach for the smelling salts. Money is not the main point here -- if a novelist were to take the life of a living person and base an entire novel on it, I should certainly think compensation would be in order -- no person, no book -- but that does not seem to be the case here. But I put that question to one side. What sticks in my craw is that he taken Smailovic and his noble deed and inexplicably assumed that he could make them his own -- presumably because he is himself an 'artist'. The "problem", he says, is that what Smailovic did was "an extrememly public act". Yes, it was. It was Smailovic's extremely public act, and it still is Smailovic's extremely public act, and he should have been consulted before he and the act were represented or misrepresented -- he seems to feel it is the latter in this case. Performing a public act does not make you a public figure, up for grabs and a sitting target. He's not a politician or a publicity-scrounging movie star. Galloway's neighbour and fellow 'artist' Deryk Houston did warn him about this and he was quite right.
Though a flute would have been really difficult to hit with gunfire...maybe a tuba? But gunfired holes would mess up the notes.
Or he could have placed him somewhere else, eg Belfast (not with a flute, please!) or Baghdad....
Post a Comment