Fiction January 1, 1

This war will go on for a long time,” Ismail Kadare writes near the end of The Siege. “This is only the beginning.” It’s no accident, though, that even a careful reader may not know exactly which war he’s talking about. On the surface, the conflict in question is a fifteenth-century Ottoman siege of an unnamed Albanian castle or, seen more broadly, Balkan resistance to Turkish rule. But in Kadare’s work, the surface doesn’t count for much. Like his other novels set deep in the Albanian past—Elegy for Kosovo (1998) and The Three-Arched Bridge (1978) among them—The Siege is not,