Synopses & Reviews
June 28, 1389: Six hundred years before Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic called for the repression of the Albanian majority in Kosovo, there took place, on the Field of the Blackbirds, a battle shrouded in legend. A coalition of Serbs, Albanian Catholics, Bosnians, and Rumanians confronted and fell to the invading Ottoman army of Sultan Murad. The battle established the Muslim foothold in Europe and became a centerpiece of Serbian nationalist ideology, justifying the campaign of ethnic cleansing of Albanian Kosovars that the world witnessed with horror at the end of the last century. In this eloquent and timely reflection on war, memory, and the destiny of two peoples, Ismail Kadare explores in fiction the legend and the consequences of that defeat.
Elegy for Kosovo is a heartfelt yet clear-eyed lament for a land riven by hatreds as old as the Homeric epics and as young as the latest news broadcast."
Ismail Kadare was born in Girokaster, Albania, in 1936. His works have been translated into more than twenty languages. He wrote this book, as the brutal events in Kosovo unfolded.
Review
"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 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." Kirkus
Review
"...a poetic, deeply moving allegory of the misunderstanding, brutality, and stupidity of the forces of the cross and the treachery of the crescent." Washington Times
Review
"A courageous and accomplished storyteller who is simply one of the best novelists alive." Bruce Allen, News and Observer
Review
"One of the most compelling novelists now writing in any language." Bruce Bawer, The Wall Street Journal
Review
"The shadow of the Kafka of The Castle and The Trial intersects [his] work....Kadare is patently a world-class novelist and prose poet." Robert Taylor, Boston Globe