Corelli's Mandolin: A Novel (original 1994; edition 1995)

Utterly brilliant. Made me laugh, made me cry. ( )

This is Benito Mussolini, one-time Fascist dictator of Italy and streetlight ornament of the same:



And this is Mussolini talking.

Unless you understand Italian, you have no idea what he's saying. But I bet, even without the historical context, you understand that he's a major asshole. Just look at the body language.

In a way, Louis de Bernières is a lot like that, a little in love with himself. His authorial blurb tells of his many manly adventures. He holds an advanced degree, but is desperate to come off as some sort of blue collar polymath. His novel suffers from it; just as Mussolini put on a façade to impress, so does de Bernières. At times, the first 150 pages read like a guy going through a thesaurus. The dialogue is solid, but he gets carried away with the narration. He flirts with magical realism, and does so in a manner more effective than most. I would provide an example, but I donated my copy to the local library.

One also gets the sense that he favors the equatorial lifestyle to the exclusion of all others. I have no problem with this (I, myself, prefer said lifestyle), but always casting the natives and Italians in a favorable light and never the Germans? It comes off a bit tidy. Maybe it helps move a love story that takes place during WWII from point to point.

The ending is just about the most unsatisfying thing I have ever read. ( )

95% percent, no question, hands down 5 stars. I love the writing, love the style, love the balance of tragedy and comedy, love the epic nature of the tale (and that's not something I often enjoy), love the way the story wavers between international and personal history, intermingled with nods to Greek myth, and love the characters... except towards the end where some of the behaviour of the main characters did not, to my mind, ring true, hence the missing star.

I wasn't sure what to expect, having only really heard bad things about the film and knowing that this was a "best-seller", which I've often found is pseudonym for "frightful dross", but I picked the book up for $3 at an op shop and a quick glance at the text had had me intrigued so I felt I didn't have much to lose. From the first page I was hooked, literally not wanting to put the book down. I carried it around the house, snatching moments to read. The historical setting was brought vividly to life as the backdrop to a set of wonderfully engaging and well-drawn characters. Four days later, I finished reading and was a little deflated.

I agree with other reviewers here on Goodreads who say that the ending is unsatisfying. It's not that it's not "Hollywood" happy -- that would have pissed me off infinitely. De Bernières apparently suffers from the affliction of many other very, very good writers: the inability to bring a rich, complex and enthralling narrative to a worthy conclusion. That made the last section terribly disappointing compared with the rest of the book.

Still, it has to stay on the "keeper" shelves. After all, a 95% brilliant book is better than a 100% so-so book any day. ( )

Pelagia is a beautiful 17-year-old girl living on the Greek island of Cephallonia when World War II breaks out. The Italians eventually occupy the island and that's when she meets Captain Antonio Corelli, a man who joined the Army because he thought it would give him plenty of time to practice his mandolin.

There were about 100 pages when I was enchanted by this book, from about page 250-350. Everything else was just okay.

The author is a beautiful writer. He's very poetic and his images just leapt to life for me. He's also a very intelligent, multi-lingual writer and my vocabulary, which I think is probably better than average, was not up to the task. Aside from obscure English words, there were bits of Greek, Italian, French, and a smattering of German thrown in for good luck. Wow. I could generally figure out what was going on, but reading this was a little too much like work in some parts. The book is told from many, many, points of view and each voice is very distinct. That's very hard to pull off, so he did get huge points for that.

He also has a little bit of the whole [b:Catch-22|168668|Catch-22|Joseph Heller|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1242256344s/168668.jpg|814330] thing going on. He shows you the absurdity of this whole war--well, this part of it, anyway--very plainly. But where Joseph Heller chose to show the horrible side of war in a very graphic injury that you've read about for a while before you find out what it is, de Bernières horrifies you and then breaks your heart in a couple of scenes that are ultimately tearfully, achingly beautiful. I'm not a crier, but even I welled up a little. He shows that while war can be absurd, it's also ugly, but our more-human moments shine all the more brightly in its darkness. Just beautiful.

The ending--eh. I saw it coming from pretty far out, so it was predictable but still left me hugely frustrated.

You could probably read my favorite 100 pages by themselves and mostly get it without reading everything else. If you ever have time on your hands at the bookstore, give it a try. Mostly though it was a lot of work for such a short payoff. I see here on GR that "people who viewed this also viewed" [b:Love in the Time of Cholera|9712|Love in the Time of Cholera|Gabriel García Márquez|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1166052341s/9712.jpg|3285349]. I can see that. So I'll agree. If you enjoyed that one, you'll probably enjoy this one too. ( )

Running throughout the novel is a Homeric theme which I really liked. Imbued with a mythic weight and a delightful tragicomic lightness, Louis de Bernieres' Corelli's Mandolin bursts with tenderness and wit.

Corelli's Mandolin is not in the least a simple love story. It is a portrait of a fiercely proud and independent little community rebelling in what small ways it can. It is a snapshot of the horrors endured by the men in combat during the Second World War. It is a damning commentary on the grandiose lack of sense among the leaders who would mold the world to fit their petty desires. It is a witty, charming, intelligent tale that possesses the reader to finish without stopping. It is a tragic story of star-crossed lovers given one more chance at happiness after a lifetime of loss, and it is worth every moment you spend turning its pages. While I love history and historical novels somewhere in the middle of the book I got slightly irate getting though sections of descriptions of war maneuvers when I really wanted to know more about other characters. Still by the end I was grateful to Bernieres for the history of which I discovered I knew so little. ( )