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Captain Corelli's Mandolin by Louis De…
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Captain Corelli's Mandolin (original 1994; edition 1998)

by Louis De Bernieres

MembersReviewsPopularityAverage ratingMentions
7,9771541,089 (3.93)371
Fiction. Romance. Historical Fiction. HTML:The acclaimed story of a timeless place that one day wakes up to find itself in the jaws of history: "An exuberant mixture of history and romance, written with a wit that is incandescent" (Los Angeles Times Book Review).

The place is the Greek island of Cephallonia, where gods once dabbled in the affairs of men and the local saint periodically rises from his sarcophagus to cure the mad. Then the tide of World War II rolls onto the island's shores in the form of the conquering Italian army.
Caught in the occupation are Pelagia, a willful, beautiful young woman, and the two suitors vying for her love: Mandras, a gentle fisherman turned ruthless guerilla, and the charming, mandolin-playing Captain Corelli, a reluctant officer of the Italian garrison on the island. Rich with loyalties and betrayals, and set against a landscape where the factual blends seamlessly with the fantastic, Corelli's Mandolin is a passionate novel as rich in ideas as it is genuinely moving.
… (more)
Member:SandDune
Title:Captain Corelli's Mandolin
Authors:Louis De Bernieres
Info:Vintage (1998), Paperback, 533 pages
Collections:Your library
Rating:
Tags:British fiction, Greece, World War 2, Cephallonia, love story

Work Information

Captain Corelli's Mandolin by Louis De Bernières (1994)

  1. 60
    Birds Without Wings by Louis de Bernières (Booksloth)
  2. 21
    Telex from Cuba by Rachel Kushner (thepequodtwo)
    thepequodtwo: Both de Bernieres and Kushner skillfully intertwine multiple story threads and characters to create a sense of time and place both passing and changing that is vivid and powerful.
  3. 10
    Eleni by Nicholas Gage (Booksloth)
  4. 21
    Spies of the Balkans by Alan Furst (TomWaitsTables)
  5. 11
    Regeneration by Pat Barker (flissp)
  6. 11
    The Magus by John Fowles (Booksloth, edwinbcn)
  7. 00
    The Winds of War by Herman Wouk (paulkid)
    paulkid: Both are set in Mussolini's Italy, although Wouk's work spends time in Germany, Russia, and England while de Bernières spends time in Greece as well.
  8. 01
    Guernica by Dave Boling (BCCJillster)
    BCCJillster: Different country, different war, same gusto of characterization and sense of place and community
  9. 45
    Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (Booksloth)
  10. 01
    Little Infamies by Panos Karnezis (Booksloth)
  11. 01
    The Hidden by Tobias Hill (Booksloth)
  12. 01
    A Thread of Grace by Mary Doria Russell (starfishian)
  13. 01
    Aphrodite's War by Andrea Busfield (aliklein)
  14. 01
    A Winter's Night by Valerio Massimo Manfredi (rrmmff2000)
  15. 35
    Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (krizia_lazaro)
  16. 13
    The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje (Johanna11)
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» See also 371 mentions

English (139)  Dutch (4)  Spanish (3)  Norwegian (2)  Greek (1)  Danish (1)  All (1)  Swedish (1)  German (1)  All languages (153)
Showing 1-5 of 139 (next | show all)
A beautifully written romance, full of colouful characters, music, humour, and horror, set around the real event of the massacre of Italian soldiers by the Nazis on Cefalonia towards the end of World War 2. The islanders mostly escape the war, until Mussolini decides to declare war on Greece. This leads many of the young men on the island to leave and join the defence of Greece. They successfully repel the Italian invaders, many of whom duped into a war deliberately started by their vain leader, who wanted to "make Italy great again" and impress Hitler. The cost is great on both sides, leaving those who survived shattered in body and spirit. Mandras, a fisherman engaged to Pelagia, makes his way home to Cefalonia, once carefree, but returns embittered, mentally ill and suspects correctly he is no longed loved. He heads off to join the Greek resistance and is inducted into a group of Communists. Carlo, the only survivor of his Italian battalion is redeployed to the Division led by Captain Coreli - now part of the occupying forces on Cephalonia. He would rather make music than war, and is a talented mandolin player whose love for Pelagia is the core of the story. Pelagia is the fiesty daughter of the local doctor Ianis. Ianis is the only doctor in the village and occasional vet. He is writing a history of the island but never manages to finish it. Pelagia falls in love first with Mandras and gets engaged to him before he goes to war. Her love for him wanes though as he never writes back, as he is illiterate. Officers are billeted in local people's homes, and Corelli is put in theirs. Initially offended by his presence, she is impressed by his music and the decency of his nature, falling in love with him and losing him even though he survives the massacre and has to escape the island. He promises to return, but the islanders suffer many hardships including a a more draconian occupation under the Nazis, near starvation, the attrocities of Communists replacing the Nazis as the new oppressors, then the earthquake of 1953 where Iannis died as the house collapsed on him, and destroyed most of the houses on the island. Pelagia, after she was attacked by Mandras, goes to Mandras' mother for support. Drosoula disowned Mandras and went to live with Pelagia to support her. A baby who was abandoned outside the house became Pelagia's adopted daughter, Antonia, because she sounded just like the mandolin. The 3 of them are moved into a new earthquake proof house, after Velasarios the strong man giant saves the village. They live through the changes of the island as it becomes a tourist destination, until finally Corelli returns claiming he was embittered by seeing Pelagia with baby Antonia thinking she had married another. He had gone on to become a fireman and then a world-touring musician. Now retired he wanted to return and build a house where Pelagia's used to be. It was a happy ending, but I felt it was dragged out this way purely to cover the earthquake and social changes on the island. Pelagia and Antonio should have reunited sooner - one thing the film did right I thought. ( )
  LindaLiu | Jan 27, 2024 |
the first page is one I would read to a prospective lover - if he laughs he's in ( )
  Overgaard | Jan 6, 2024 |
This book had so much going for it. Set in WWII, de Bernieres tells the tale of a doctor and his daughter living in Greece. The focus of the book is on the daughter as she is initially wooed by a local fisherman, but later falls in love with an Italian captain, Corelli, who is living in their home while Greece is occupied.
de Bernieres does an amazing job of weaving together multiple storylines as we are introduced to a number of quirky and interesting characters, and we fall in love with them all. Seriously, this is no easy task. He makes each person come alive, and we care about them. He also manages to sneak in an enormous amount of history about this particular location in Greece and the hardships of WWII. It's heartbreaking and romantic and graphic, and yet it is also very literary and the story is revealed to you in small bite sized chapters.
It was well on the way to the Pomerantz pantheon of 5 stardom until the last 60 pages or so.
I'm not quite sure how to share my critique without revealing any spoilers, but let's just say that whereas the rest of the book was delightfully paced and written, the last 60 pages races through around 50 years of history, introduces several new characters you don't care about, and then ends with a very unbelievable misunderstanding that basically could have been rectified in about five different ways - - all of them fairly easy. In his quest to create a romantic, heartbreaking denouement, I think he just went way over the top. And not in a good way.
So, the book gets 4 stars, but justifiably could get less. I just couldn't fail to give credit for the delightful writing that beguiled me for the first 300 pages. It was a very nice ride that fell flat. ( )
  Anita_Pomerantz | Mar 23, 2023 |
Pelagia lives with her father Dr. Iannis on the Greek Island of Cephalonia. They have a relatively idyllic existence until WWII begins, taking Pelagia's fiance to the front, and until the Italian and German occupation of the island starts in 1941. Pelagia and her father are initially suspect when they are required to host an Italian captain, Antonio Corelli, but over the course of his stay, the captain manages to win them over with his gentle charm and beautiful mandolin playing, and eventually, he and Pelagia fall in love. But the war rages on and when Antonio and Pelagia are separated, they do not know when or if they will meet again.

I wasn't sure I would enjoy this; I had lumped it in my head with The English Patient (both acclaimed literary war novels that I bought at the same time from a library book sale with movie tie-in covers, I guess?) which didn't really work for me when I read it last year. But I really enjoyed this one! The setting is gorgeous and Bernieres does a good job of balancing the parts that dive into the atrocities of war with the less gruesome but still difficult aspects of the war's effect on normal people. I also appreciated that this book didn't end with the war ending, but instead gave us closure. 4 stars. ( )
  curioussquared | Mar 3, 2023 |
Good book, good movie, good read. ( )
  mykl-s | Nov 25, 2022 |
Showing 1-5 of 139 (next | show all)
Just a sumptuous read. It made me cry.
added by Cynfelyn | editThe Guardian, Jon Snow (Nov 19, 1999)
 

» Add other authors (30 possible)

Author nameRoleType of authorWork?Status
De Bernières, Louisprimary authorall editionsconfirmed
Munro, RonaPlaywright adaptormain authorsome editionsconfirmed
Anderson, MarjorieCover designersecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Bogin, LubinCover artistsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Davids, TinkeTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Engen, BodilTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
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Epigraph
[poem] The Soldier by Humbert Wolfe
Dedication
To my mother and father, who in different places and in different ways fought against the Fascists and the Nazis, lost many of their closest friends, and were never thanked.
First words
Dr. Iannis had enjoyed a satisfactory day in which none of his patients had died or got any worse.
Quotations
‘Love is a kind of dementia with very precise and oft-repeated clinical symptoms. You blush in each other’s presence, you both hover in places where you expect the other to pass, you are both a little tongue-tied, you both laugh inexplicably and too long, you become quite nauseatingly girlish, and he becomes quite ridiculously gallant.’
‘And another thing. Love is a temporary madness, it erupts like a volcano and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever be apart. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion, it is not the desire to mate every second minute of the day, it is not lying awake at night imagining that he is kissing every cranny of your body... That is just being ‘in love’ which any fool can do. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident.'
Last words
(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)
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Fiction. Romance. Historical Fiction. HTML:The acclaimed story of a timeless place that one day wakes up to find itself in the jaws of history: "An exuberant mixture of history and romance, written with a wit that is incandescent" (Los Angeles Times Book Review).

The place is the Greek island of Cephallonia, where gods once dabbled in the affairs of men and the local saint periodically rises from his sarcophagus to cure the mad. Then the tide of World War II rolls onto the island's shores in the form of the conquering Italian army.
Caught in the occupation are Pelagia, a willful, beautiful young woman, and the two suitors vying for her love: Mandras, a gentle fisherman turned ruthless guerilla, and the charming, mandolin-playing Captain Corelli, a reluctant officer of the Italian garrison on the island. Rich with loyalties and betrayals, and set against a landscape where the factual blends seamlessly with the fantastic, Corelli's Mandolin is a passionate novel as rich in ideas as it is genuinely moving.

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