Flight of Fancy

It blew right into the lake. Like the blackbird, Kos, in its title, Chris Gudgeon’s new novel, Song of Kosovo, suddenly took wing on me and flew. That I had left it unattended on a chaise cushion where a violent gust of wind picked up both and deposited them in the drink is a feeble explanation for what happened. No, I prefer to think that, like that blackbird, the book took off on its own, and then, akin to the spirit of Chris Gudgeon’s story, dove, as if picked off by some stray bullet, right into the water, hitting the realm of the northern walleye with an at once alarming and droll thwack.

I was about a third of the way into the tome, puzzling over its purpose, characters and gist. Yugoslavia, or what was left of it at the end of the last, the 20th, century, is Gudgeon’s setting. We all know that it was in the Balkan peninsula, Sarajevo specifically, that the century had its real beginning in 1914 with that shot heard round the world; and where in 1999...