Elegy for Kosovo: Stories [Englisch] [Gebundene Ausgabe]

This is a retelling of the legendary battle in which a combined force of Serbs, Bosnians, Romanians, and Christian Albanians was defeated by the superior military of the Ottoman Empire on June 28, 1389. The battle took place on the plains of Kosovo. Kadare's purpose, of course, is to show how violence repeats itself in Balkan history. Yet what makes this story even more interesting is not just the fact that ancient enemies came together in a common cause, but also that even as allies they could not forget their enmity toward one another. The story itself, told in a kind of mini-epic style, abounds with many voices detailing their points of view regarding the battle and its aftermath. It concludes in a magic realist way as the shade of Sultan Murad I, who died in the battle, recounts the whisperings of renewed violence he has heard over the centuries, particularly in the late twentieth century. Frank Caso
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Albania's Kadare is probably the premier writer of fiction to have emerged from the Balkan countries since Bosnian Nobel-winning novelist Ivo Andric. His latest (1998) locates the sources of Slobodan Milosevc's campaign of “ethnic cleansing” in a 14th–century battle fought on the Blackbird Plains of Kosovo, in which armies of Serbs and those allied with them were defeated by Ottoman Turks, and the seeds of sectarian resentment and hatred were thus firmly planted in the blood-soaked soil. The figures of an idealistic Prince, two naive “minstrels of war,” and a “great lady” who reveres and mourns the vanished culture of classical Greece, among others, provide representative involved figures, in a “novel” that's really as much an essay in historiography as it is fiction: an effort to explain how a people to whom unity would seem so natural have become instead so fiercely divided. As such, it's a revealing addition to such acclaimed novels as Chronicle in Stone and The Three-Arched Bridge, and one of Kadare's most eloquent books. -- Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.