[ALBSA-Info] LA TIMES, 3.12.2000

[Agron Alibali]

Los Angeles Times
3.12.2000

Book Review
p. 2.


THE BEST BOOKS OF 2000
THE BEST FICTIONS 
................
ELEGY FOR KOSOVO 

By Ismail Kadare 

Translated from the Albanian 

by Peter Constantine 

Arcade: 128 pp., $ 17.95 

"Blood flows one way in life and another in song," a
Serbian minstrel sings on the eve of the legendary and
bloody battle on the Blackbird Plains in Kosovo, on
June 28, 1389. Here the Turkish Sultan, Murad, led his
troops against a raucous coalition of Serbs,
Albanians, Catholics, Bosnians and Romanians, whom
they had cursed with the name "Balkans." "With such a
name bestowed upon them by the enemy, they marched to
battle and defeat." How could they win, the omniscient
narrator muses, against an enemy united under Allah?
And in the battle on the Blackbird Plains, they lose,
and their Sultan is murdered, his blood spread on the
plain like a curse. In this small novel, there is a
twist of history: It is the Sultan's double who is
murdered, and the Sultan himself lives entombed on the
plains to witness the atrocities 600 years later. A
Serbian minstrel, Gjorg, flees the battle and in the
following days tries with his fellow fugitives to find
shelter and food. In one village, he is asked to play
in the home of a great lady who, mourning the ideals
of Greek civilization and envisioning the bloody
future, thinks, "One has to lose a thing in order to
cherish it!" Ismail Kadare is a master at the pure
explanation, the simple revelation. He has written
many books about war, told from a perspective that
most of us cannot imagine, and in so doing, he sheds a
ray of light through our abject failure to understand
the Balkans. 

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