SOURCE: Margaronis, Maria. “Palaces of Dreams.” Nation 270, no. 23 (12 June 2000): 28-31.

In the following review, Margaronis asserts that Elegy for Kosovo should be read as fiction, rather than historical fact, and offers a biographical and critical overview of Kadare and his work.

The Battle of Kosovo, at which the Ottoman forces of Sultan Murad I defeated an assortment of Balkan leaders under the Serb Prince Lazar in 1389, is mostly known to the world through the mythology of Serbian nationalism, which takes it as the holy funeral pyre from which the Serbian phoenix will one day rise again. It was on the 600th anniversary of that battle that Slobodan Milosevic so ominously rallied his supporters in an area inhabited mainly by ethnic Albanians, effectively announcing his intention to tear apart the state of Yugoslavia.

In 1998, the year before the Kosovo crisis drew NATO into the Yugoslav war, the Albanian novelist...