Captain Corelli's Mandolin

I endured emotional whiplash from the shift in mood between quirky, zany antics of a small Greek village and the horrors experienced on the Grecian World War II front, followed by those of a civil war. Perhaps this is to emphasize the void between the soldiers' experience and that of civilian life, or the costs of war, or to alleviate the mood, or ...? Whatever the reason, the rapid shifts between the two (all the chapters are short) makes for a very bumpy ride. It inspired a laugh in several places, weighted with an undercurrent of hesitancy as I'd recall scenes from the chapter just before. And then there is the slowly growing premonition that, before all is finished, these two things are destined to meet one another. I had little show more idea how much this novel was indebted to actual history until I discovered the Wikipedia entry for the island of Cephalonia.

The movie trailers from 2001 were all I had as first impression (I've never seen the movie) so I anticipated the romance bits, but they are mere window dressing. Nobody would mistake this for a romance novel. It's a brutal war novel, but one that happens to know a thing a two about love, as when the doctor is speaking to his daughter: "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 ... No, don't blush, I am telling you some truths. 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. Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew toward each other underground, and when all the pretty blossoms had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two." It also knows a thing or two about how individuals and nations can find their feet again after a hard fall. show less

A historical novel of the very best kind...full of actual history, human stories of love, sacrifice, joy and sorrow sweeping the reader along with all the emotions. I saw the movie based on this novel, and remember being relatively unmoved by it. That probably kept me from visiting the book for years, unfortunately.

In World War II, a Greek physician and his lovely young daughter on the Isle of Cephalonia live through the occupation of their paradise by both Italians and Germans; the privations and horrors associated with war in general; the treachery and brutality of an army on the verge of defeat; and the ultimate insult added to those injuries: the massive earthquake of 1953 that destroyed their homes. Through it all, the islanders show more manage feats of bravery and resistance; find some sympathy, friendship, and even love among the occupiers; question the ancient gods, philosophers and poets; endure. The lively irreverent Captain Antonio Corelli and his mandolin lighten the mood, and encourage hope for the future, but circumstances do not bode well for any sort of happy ending. Reviewers have aptly compared this novel to Tolstoy and Dickens, for it is tragic and comic in equal measure. Sometimes it's hard to know which mask you're seeing. 5 stars show less

I read this book in my late teens / early twenties, and adored it. So with war in Europe again, I went back to see if the suck fairy had visited...

And was pleasantly surprised! It remains lyrical, entrancing, heartbreaking and stirring, staying with your heart like the last chords of mandolin music echoing over the hills.

It is such an odd book. de Bernieres' ridiculously over the top prose isn't even trying to be literary, but somehow the florid and convoluted sentences are just right for drawing out the personalities of his characters and the world they live in. And it is the carefully drawn personalities that make this book. It is so easy to fall in love with Psipsina the pine marten, the gentle Doctor with his rambling history, and show more of course Pelagia and her handsome captain. Even the baddies are drawn sympathetically and complexly. Bits remind me of Ulysses, that very stream-of-conscious intimate insight into people's minds.

When I was younger I read it for the love triangle - betrothed to a man she can no longer love, Pelagia falls for an Italian captain, and must hide her love or be branded a collaborator. Now I am older, the themes of PTSD and being broken by tragedy are so much clearer - Mandras, broken by the horrors of war, Dr Iannis who never speaks again after the earthquake, Pelagia nursing her father's grave... The war in this book is horrific and traumatic, flesh sloughing off from frostbite, doomed marches with little reason or hope...

There are a few things that are more uncomfortable to me now though. At the time, the book was one of the first I had encountered with a sympathetic gay character. Now the story of 'gay man stays closetted his entire life and dies heroically saving the man he loves' is more uncomfortable than it was then,. And Corelli's homophobia, while realistic, is so sad: 'I wish you hadn't shown me these. I've just realised that I'm more old fashioned than I thought'. Also, for all Pelagia is painted as So Awesome and going to be a female doctor, she is surprisingly passive in much of the main storyline, and the lengths the book goes to to have her still pure and virginal and making sure we all know this is slightly uncomfortable. 'She is going to bring up a child! But definitely not Her Child!' 'She is going to get raped by her ex fiance! But definitely Not Enough to make her Damaged Goods!' The way she waits around for Corelli forever, but never actually does any kind of research on Italian mandarin players, would be amazingly annoying, if it wasn't contrasted with the supremely ridiculous 'I came all this way to see you but ran away because you were holding a baby' behaviour of Corelli.

Then again, maybe that's what I love about this book, the characters are full of human foibles and ridiculousness, and that's what makes them lovable even as we roll our eyes at them. show less

Historical fiction set on the Greek island of Cephalonia during the Axis powers’ occupation in WWII. The first part focuses on a young Greek woman, Pelagia, and her widowed physician father, Dr. Iannis. Pelagia learns medical techniques by watching her father, and she is educated beyond the typical level (especially for a woman of the time) due to being the doctor’s only child. She and a local fisherman, Mandras, fall in love and get engaged. He goes off to fight the war on the Albanian front. During his absence, Pelagia writes to him but never receives a reply. Meanwhile, Captain Antonio Corelli, the leader of the Italian occupying forces, is housed with Dr. Iannis and Pelagia. He is no zealot – his goal is to have “a peaceful show more war.” At first Pelagia is determined to resist the occupiers, but she gradually begins to admire Corelli, especially when he plays his mandolin. Mandras returns and Pelagia must decide what to do.

The author gradually develops the romantic liaison between Corelli and Pelagia. In fact, this entire story is gradually layered. All of these characters are complex and come across as authentic, with both strengths and flaws. There are a number of secondary characters that complement the primary storylines, and they are beautifully rendered. For example, the (gay) relationship between Carlo and Francesco is both sweet and tragic. There is also a wayward priest and a strongman. They are eccentric and memorable characters, and they add depth to the narrative.

One of the primary themes is the adverse effects of ideologies on ordinary people. It includes real historical figures such as Mussolini, Hitler, and Metaxas. We follow Mandras from happy-go-lucky fisherman to vindictive soldier. Another main theme is the different types of love – brotherly, religious, romantic, familial, and sacrificial. This novel is a condemnation of totalitarianism. The author employs musical themes to offset some of the horrors of war.

This is a five-star read for the first three-quarters. The author took time in developing details and layers of setting and characters during the war. The last quarter takes large leaps in time and feels rushed in comparison. As a warning, war-time atrocities are vividly depicted.

4.5 show less

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 show more 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. show less

The ancient Greeks treated tragedy and comedy as separate genres. But this Greek drama is a hybrid. Tragedy on the large and small canvas; comedy from individual characters. Such contrasts can strengthen one's reaction to both extremes, but for me, this particular book might have worked better if de Bernières had focused primarily on one or the other.

I see its charm. This is a feelgood book, filled with bucolic delights, entertaining Characters (borderline caricatures and slapstick), and saccharine sun. But they are contrasted with war, loss, and the pragmatics of making do. Humour, love, and music soften the graphically portrayed toll of war and tectonics.

Some of the writing is beautiful, and some of it is funny. I was captivated by show more the opening paragraph and loved the first chapter. But I was bored by the second chapter, and nervous when I started the third. The final, near contemporary, chapters were simultaneously predictable and implausible. It’s as if de Bernières wanted a happy(ish) ending, but not a happy middle, and went to ludicrous lengths to achieve it.

That patchy experience, with many different voices, styles, and genres, was repeated throughout: a bitty book, hence a bitty review. Like a visitor to the island, I ambled from beautiful beaches to rocky outcrops, along smooth pavements and disintegrating paths, from mountains to fields, from tourist towns to ancient villages, ever unsure of what I would encounter next. Maybe the rose-tinted hues of sangria would have helped.

I think this is probably an objective 4*, but my experience ranged from 2* to 4*, averaging 3*.

The Distorting Lenses of History and Ideology

“History repeats itself, first as tragedy, and then again as tragedy.”

More… (no plot spoilers).
Cephallonia was settled so long ago that a veil blurs the boundary between myth and history. It is sometimes claimed as the home of Odysseus, and today, the enormous ancient olive trees have an air of “patient omniscience”.

The backdrop is a detailed history of the Italian and then German occupation in WW2, including international geopolitics and detailed battle tactics. Not my thing. Fortunately, de Bernières tells the story from local perspectives, as well as that of global victors.

Italian soldier, Carlo Guercio, believes history should be “the anecdotes of the little people” (he himself is physically huge). Dr Iannis is little in the grand scheme of things, but a figure of towering importance in his village. He spends many years writing a detailed history of the island, but is frustrated that his own passion makes objectivity impossible, creating “not so much a history as a lament. Or a tirade.” And then history “happens before my very eyes”. Later, his daughter, Pelagia, continues his work, putting her own spin on things.

Many characters are deeply conscious of their roots. But the atrocities of war, driven by persuasive demagogues touting totalitarian ideologies (communist and fascist) transform minds, hearts, loyalties, and lives forever.

People are separated from their heritage, their future, their families, and even their sanity. If you believe strongly enough in your cause, “Death is not an enemy, but a brother”, whether to embrace for its own sake, or to save others.

In the final chapters, capitalism, tourism, and hedonism herald further transformation for those on the island.


Love of All Kinds at its Heart

“Love delayed is lust augmented.”
“Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away… But sometimes the petals fall away and the roots have not entwined.”

More… (no plot spoilers).
Love is at the heart of this story. It has a big heart, and central to it all is the widowed Doctor Iannis and his daughter Pelagia (seventeen at the start). I loved them both, and their “gentle idyll with its mock contretemps, its tranquil routines, and its congenial eccentricities”.

There is young love, old love, a love triangle, parent-child love, love for a stranger’s child, unrequited taboo love, love across other boundaries (“a dark secret that everybody knew”), love for animals (Psipsina, the pine marten, and Pelagia’s goat – shades of Gerald Durrell), love of country, and love of music (opera in the latrine, and the eponymous mandolin).

Antonio Corelli is musician more than soldier. He plays his mandolin with “nightingales in his fingers” and “a symphony of expressions was passing over his face”. Pelagia realises music is “an emotion and intellectual Odyssey”. There is a whole chapter where he muses on his instrument being a metaphor for the woman he loves.

The hopeful message is that however hard life is, love for someone, or something, makes it bearable - as long as that love is not for excessive food or drink, or for a dangerous ideology.


L’Omosessuale

“I am mentioned almost nowhere, but where I find myself, I find myself condemned.”

More… (no plot spoilers).
Several early chapters explore the inner agony of a man’s secret love for a straight man. These are powerful, painful passages.

Later, it felt like more of an occasional, external, but nevertheless crucial plot point. It was just one of the ways the unpredictable variability of style, tone, and content unbalanced me.

• “I am a foreigner within my own nation, an alien in my own race. I am as detested as cancer.”
• “To me the company of a woman is painful because it reminds me of what I am not.”
• “A guilty man wishes only to be understood, because to be understood is to appear to be forgiven… No one knows that I am guilty [gay], and nonetheless I wish to be understood.”


The Changing Role of Women

The story stretches from 1941 to 1993, a period of great social change on the island, especially for women.

More… (no plot spoilers).
At the start, the doctor has almost scandalously progressive ideas, so Pelagia is educated, independently minded, and won’t get a dowry. This, at a time when marriage is likely to be “childbirth and relentless work”, with “no freedom until widowhood… when the community would turn against her”.

Yet in middle age, Pelagia finds herself disapproving of how Antonia juggles career and motherhood. There is no answer to having it all.


Excusing Evil?

There’s a chapter titled “The Good Nazi”.

More… (no plot spoilers).
It’s easy to label people and events in binary terms, but simplification masks uncomfortable truths. A strength of this book is the conflict created in the reader’s mind by the compassion used when portraying those who commit unspeakable acts.

Günter Weber and others are seen, in part, as a victims of circumstance or gullibility, “maddened and broken by his own dutiful atrocities”, or finding redemption through sacrifice.

Perhaps this generosity reflects the islanders’ tradition of being “hospitable even to those who do not merit it”. They ridicule, prank, inconvenience, and try to exploit the Italian invaders (the Germans, not so much), wary of being thought collaborators, but mostly coming to mutual, somewhat uneasy acceptance.

They grudgingly feed the hand that bites them:
“This is Cephallonian meat pie… except that thanks to your people, it doesn’t have any meat in it.”


Sesquipedalian Vocabulary

How can anyone be “hyperbolically bisexual”?!

More… (no plot spoilers).
I love rich and unusual words, but at times, especially in the first quarter, de Bernières was over-generous with his profusion of obscure, and sometimes invented words, mostly via the delightful, multi-lingual doctor: stalagmitic, prestidigitation, effulgent, iatric mystique, eleusinian, iconostasis, stertoriously, corybantic, sternutatory, for example.


Satirising a Demagogue

A leaflet trashing Mussolini is anonymously written, printed, and distributed on the island. I read it in the final days of the US election of 2016, and finished my review the day Donald J Trump was declared President Elect - a man whose candidacy was first treated as comedy, but now feels more like tragedy:

More… (no plot spoilers).
• He “believes his own propaganda”.
• Something “is not true, even though everyone who knew Him in those days remembers it perfectly”.
• He “diverted funds… for His own election campaign”.
• “He has pretended to be a Catholic.”
• He gerrymanders, appoints only sycophants, oppresses minorities, and approves of torture.
• “He has assumed infallibility and encouraged the people to carry His image in marches, as though He were saint.”
• “He agreed completely with the last person he spoke to.”
• “Everything in his speeches is contradicted somewhere by another speech.”
• But “the speeches of a lunatic are treated as sacred texts”.


National(istic) Stereotypes

The first batch were mildly amusing and the style was reminiscent of Yes, Prime Minister, for example: Hacker: Don't tell me about the press. I know exactly who reads the papers: the Daily Mirror is read by people who think they run the country; The Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country; The Times is read by people who actually do run the country; the Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country; the Financial Times is read by people who own the country; The Morning Star is read by people who think the country ought to be run by another country; and The Daily Telegraph is read by people who think it is.
Sir Humphrey: Prime Minister, what about the people who read The Sun?
Bernard: Sun readers don't care who runs the country, as long as she's got big tits.
.
But as they kept coming, they lost their sheen.

More… (no plot spoilers).
The well-travelled and well-read doctor opines:

“Germany is taking everything, the Italians are playing the fool, the French have run away, the Belgians have been overrun whilst they were looking the other way, the Poles have been charging tanks with cavalry, the Americans have been playing baseball, the British have been drinking tea and adjusting their monocles, the Russians have been sitting on their hands except when voting unanimously to do whatever they are told.”

“Italians always act without thinking… A German plans a month in advance what his bowel movements will be… and the British plan everything in retrospect, so it always looks as though everything occurred as they intended. The French plan everything whilst appearing to be having a party, and the Spanish… well, God knows.”

An unnamed narrator observes 1953:

“Great Britain was less wealthy than it is now, but it was also less complacent, and considerably less useless. It had a sense of humanitarian responsibility and a myth of its own importance that was quixotically true and universally accepted merely because it believed in it… It had not yet acquired the schoolboy habit of for waiting months for permission from Washington before it clambered out of its post-imperial bed, put on its boots, made a sugary cup of tea, and ventured through the door.”

And near the end, a teenage boy compares girls:

“Italian girls were best, and English girls were useless unless inebriated. German girls were technicians, Spanish girls uncontrollable and melodramatic, and French girls were so vain you had to pretend to be in love with them from the start.”


Enchanting Isle - Quotes

“An island so immense in antiquity that the very rocks themselves exhale nostalgia and the red earth lies stupefied not only by the sun, but by the impossible weight of memory.”

More… (no plot spoilers).
Since ancient times, “the island had been a prodigy of wonders” with “a saint unique to itself, and it was as if his numinous power was too great and too effulgent to be contained within himself.”

The Acqui Division “surrendered to its charms, had sunk back into its cushions, closed its eyes and become enclosed in a gentle dream. We forgot to be soldiers.”

“Mountains… ringed to infinity by the churning masses of the sea.”


Other Quotes

“A gibbous moon slid filaments of eerie silver light through the slats of the shutters.”

More… (no plot spoilers).

• “The extreme vestal chastity of this light.”

• “Short of words even in his inner speech… a prodigy of slow endurance.” (Alekos, an old goat herd.)

• An “anthropomorphised promissory note.” (Father Arsenios.)

• “The innumerable smiles of the waves”, by Aeschylus, “who obviously never went to sea in the winter”.

• “It is impossible to escape those monsters that devour us from the inner depths.” The only solution is to wrestle with them, or ignore them.

• “Symmetry is only a property of dead things” and buildings. “Symmetry is for God, not for us.”

• “The Morse code of virgin light glancing after the perpetual motion of the waters.”

• “Unravelling wool that had kinked and interwound upon itself in an attempt to resume the knotted configurations of its former state. Pelagia did not understand why wool should be nostalgic in this way.”

• “They became lovers in the old-fashioned sense” (chaste, but planning for the future).

• “His mouth working wordlessly like an improvident fish that a wave has tossed unsuspectingly on a spit of sand.”

• Tanks “perspiring with the inhuman smell of oil and heated steel.”

• “A night that was made sepulchral by the attenuated and dancing shadows of trees and men that were cast out by the leaping orange pyres.”

• “The ancient olive… made obeisance to the ground and split cleanly… before springing upright and shaking its branches like a palsied Nazarene.”

• “I am my own ghost… I have been eaten up like bread… All my happiness was smoke.”

• “A man who smelled of exactly the correct admixture of virility and aftershave.”

• “The silent and deserted remains of the little houses that had all the appearance of regret and loneliness.”



Why I read this
In accordance with comment #25: here, I read this and Kevin read Galapagos.

Image source for tragedy/comedy masks:
http://aguera.com.br/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/20130130_135956.jpg show less

Set on the Greek island of Cephallonia, the story begins during World War II and follows Pelagia and her father Iannis through the rest of their lives. During the Italian occupation of the island, Pelagia falls in love with the young Italian captain who is billeted in their house, a romantic and quirky mandolin player named Corelli.

I fell in love with the book and its eccentric characters quickly. I would love to know these characters in person and to live in the village as it was before the war. The first half of the book definitely rates 5 stars from me, but the second half just barely made it to 5 stars because of how dark the story got as the atrocities of the war were piled on one after another. This made the book harder to read, show more but it did not detract from the quality. I can't wait to pick up some more of de Bernieres' books, especially The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts (because really, who doesn't want to read a book with that kind of title?). show less