Customer Reviews

Corelli's Mandolin : A Novel (Cassette/Abridged)

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2 star:		(11)
1 star:		(20)

 

 

It wasn't because it was raining, it wasn't that I had nothing else to do, it wasn't because I had just split up with a boyfriend, my TV was working, and yet I sat in for the whole of this weekend in absolute emotional turmoil. All because of Captain Corelli's Mandolin. The book takes you through the bumpy ride of a small island's history. Together with the characters we go through war from all angles, occupation, earthquakes and most traumatically losing loved ones. Depressing as that may sound to some of you, Bernières is one of only a handful of authors who has the gifted touch of making his readers laugh out loud. I often found myself having to read through tear filled eyes, only to be laughing at the same time because Bernières has seen fit to enhance heart rendering stories with some true life observations (I couldn't possibly give an example as it might spoil the book- just trust me, it's funny). It is a book that deals with every type of love; between man and country, father and daughter, man and woman, pine marten and mice. It is so easy to identify with that I'm sure I was blushing, as if he had read my thoughts. It truely is a compelling read, so full of little gems that you might want to keep pen and paper to hand, as well as some tissues for the snivelly bits. The structure of the book is such that it may take a little while to get used to ( lots of characters take a chapter each and we eavesdrop in on their mind workings.). But after a short while it comes together and as a reader I feel we are left with the perfect situation- no, one omniscient narrator, yet the ability to see the entire picture. It's a fabulous read. Make sure you've got nothing planned for the weekend!

"Corelli's Mandolin" came highly recommended by two friends whose sophisticated taste in fiction I trust. I won't comment on the plot, as the synopses above do that very well. Mr. de Bernieres is an exceptional prose stylist, who writes beautiful, elegant sentences, provides descriptions of such clarity as to make your inner eye need sunglasses, and has a twisted comic sense that reminds me of Mark Helprin and John Irving. The first 100 pages are slow going, yet still very involving, as you are introduced to the cast of characters, the island of Cephallonia, and the events leading up to the Italian occupation of the island. The pace picks up once Captain Corelli arrives on the scene and begins his beguiling seduction of Pelagia. But I must caution potential readers: this novel is dense with information, multiple narrative viewpoints, satire, history, an odd assortment of characters, and the narrator's discursive approach. I did not find this book to be a "breezy" or fast read. This is not a plot-driven novel or a page-turner by any means. If you like similar books and think the premise sounds interesting, then prepare to settle in for a leisurely, occasionally mind-bending read. Personally, I think that Mark Helprin's "A Soldier of the Great War" is a far more successful attempt at the same type of novel. Helprin is a brilliant writer with a huge intellect who plots like a madman, writes inspired and wickedly funny dialogue, and paints word pictures that will be indelibly etched in your mind. "Soldier" is probably my favorite book of the 1990's. "Corelli's Mandolin" is excellent but it's not truly a classic. Nevertheless, I await de Bernieres' next book with anticipation.

On the island, I have heard that Louis desBernieres only actually spent a few days here doing research. I found this so hard to believe.

Through his words and the pictures he paints in the mind, you are transported to this most wonderful place. I felt Mandras' and Corelli's pain as they endured horrific events as the war unfolds. I dislike war novels of any kind, but this work brings the human element into play in a way that it would be as though your brother or a friend were at war -- you would hang on every word for information.

The love story is brilliant -- until the very end. The ending is too quickly "tacked on" and detracts significantly from the excellent quality of the writing. It is also one of those "too good to be true" endings. However, put this aside and create your own ending, because the rest of the work -- the language, the plot, characterizations, are so masterfully crafted that my disappointment at the ending was tempered by the memories of these great characters.

Louis desBernieres created a moving, wonderful book out of an obscure topic with regard to WWII, very few people out there are aware of the war atrocities committed in Greece.

I am most worried that once the film is released, that our family's island paradise will be inundated with tourists! Cephallonia is truly one of the most unusually different, most hauntingly beautiful and least visited Greek islands. I would love it if it were always so, but it is inevitable that because of this book, there will be a great interest garnered in visiting. If you do manage to make it over here, enjoy -- but respect the islanders and the environment, please (especially the beaches, which are unparalleled in Greece)!

CORELLI'S MANDOLIN is a bewitching novel, which should, by all rights, endure as a classic. Content as I usually am with relatively trashy popular fiction, I don't know that I can write a review that'll do this volume the honor it merits.

This is the life story of Pelagia, a Greek woman living on the (actual) island of Cephallonia off Greece's western coast. The narrative begins at her age of 17, and continues for about fifty-three years. Eighty percent of the storyline takes place immediately before and during the Italian-German occupation of the island during the Second World War. The plot is a tapestry of human existence, woven with its diverse threads: absurdity, tragedy, love, betrayal, loyalty, madness, cruelty, fear, courage, resilience, selflessness, loss, revenge, hatred, and comedy. And because the Grecian theater of the wider conflict is so central to the story, the author doesn't abstain from including its history, foolishness, heroics, and horrific brutalities.

CORELLI'S MANDOLIN is filled with a wealth of memorable characters, all created with transcendent skill by the author, Louis de Bernières. Besides Pelagia, there's her wise father, Iannis, a self-taught physician and an amateur historian. There are the other Greek villagers of note: the indomitable Drosoula, the mischievous Lemoni, the priest Arsenios, and the giant (in strength and spirit) Velisarios. And, then there's Pelagia's "funny kind of cat", the engaging Psipsina, a pet pine marten. Above all are the two young men who love Pelagia - Mandras, a neighbor ultimately debased and coarsened by the war, and Corelli of the occupying Italian Army, who is ennobled. Captain Antonio Correlli of the Acqui Division, and his mandolin.

The essence of the tale is Pelagia's determined survival in the face of every cruel misfortune, grievous loss, and emotional hit delivered upon her over the years. For example, the death of her father:

"I remember when Velisarios set (my father's body) down and I knelt beside him, blind and drunk with tears, and I cradled his bloodied head in my hands and saw that his eyes were empty. His old eyes, looking not on me but on the hidden world beyond. And I thought then for the first time how small and frail he was, how beaten and betrayed, and I realized that without his soul he was so light and thin that even I could lift him. And I raised up his body and clasped his head in my breast, and a great cry came out that must have been mine, and I saw clearly as one sees a mountain that he was the only man I've loved who loved me to the end, and never bruised my heart, and never for a single moment failed me."

De Bernières has crafted this epic with insight, inventiveness, compassion, an eye for detail, gentle humor, moral outrage, and intelligence. The reader's heart goes out to Kyria Pelagia, and, at the book's conclusion, is uplifted as Fortune, or a merciful God, extends to the old woman a well-earned and overdue benevolence.

You will likely not read a better work of fiction in your lifetime.

I finished Corelli's Mandolin almost two years ago. I've been holding off writing this review because each time I get around to it, I feel I'm not up to it. It's just that...this is the finest fiction I've ever encountered and I thought only my best words and thoughts would do it justice. With 2001 underway, I've decided that day is not coming soon - time to do it.

I could go on all day about the beauty and intensity of this tale, but I'll restrict my commentary to the three following items:

1. You must give this book 50 pages to settle in. The first 50 will feel like tough slogging. The book does not find its paces until the Italian troops start marching their way to Athens. Then, you're off and running.

2. I urge you to read the book before the movie comes out. Form your own visions of Corelli and Pelagia before having to deal with the images selected by the filmmakers. I won't reveal those names here (you can find them elsewhere if you like), but will only say that the choice for Pelagia is inspired; the choice for Corelli...well, I'm skeptical it'll work.

3. The power of Corelli: I have approached total strangers browsing the fiction section of bookstores and pressed this book into their hands urging they choose this one.

Don't pass this up.

What a wonderful way to start the new year...with this magnificent story.  Set on the Greek island of Cephallonia, the reader is thrust into the 'literally' lush, emotionally rich, sharply humorous, painfully tragic story of the beautiful Pelagia.  This spirited young woman lives with her father, the village physician and self-appointed historian.  This is the tale of the small town on Cephallonia, Pelagia's life, her two great loves (one a beautiful young Greek fisherman whom the war ravages, and the other a somewhat shy, sweet Italian army captain who plays Antonia, his mandolin), and the Second World War in the Balkans (which include Greece).   I loved this book and will blatantly quote the Washington Post, "(It) brims with all the grand topics of literature - love and death, heroism and skullduggery, humor and pathos, not to mention art and religion.  A good old-fashioned novel."   This is a wonderful curl-up-in-bed-for-a-few-hours-and-be-transported novel.

De Bernieres has redefined the historical novel as we came to know it in the twentieth century. He weaves the threads of his story together brilliantly, in a sense telling the whole story of WWII on the minimalist stage of Cephallonia, where even the good villagers know that "objectivity is impossible". Abandoning the simplistic morality of virtually all WWII literature, the story neither demonizes the usual "bad guys" (i.e., the fascists) nor glamorizes the "good guys" (the Resistance, the Allies). Instead, we are forced to accept the fundamental truth that no one's hands are in fact clean. War soils everyone involved.

As a Greek, I am stunned by the accuracy with which De Bernieres captures the character of my people. I have never before seen the modern Greeks so masterfully rendered in prose. Their quirks, the rhythm of their speech, their attitudes toward the Orthodox Church are all captured beautifully. On a deeper level, the novel both literally explains and gently portrays the contrast in the Greek character between the "Romios", the Zorba stereotype, full of kefi (spirit) and fury, and the "Hellene", the ascetic, full of brooding intellectual melancholy - the ancient battle for the Greek soul between Dionysus and Apollo, Aphrodite and Athena. De Bernieres insightfully observes that these two sides of the Greek character come together only, as Mussolina learned, when Greece herself is threatened.

The significance of the Greek triumph over Mussolini's huge, well-equipped army in 1940-41 cannot be overstated. Up until that point, every nation in Europe which Mussolini and Hitler threatened had been easily overrun by the Axis, effectively leaving only Britain and Greece, at opposite corners of the European continent, out of their empire. The bombing of London was incessant, and England was in despair. Suddenly, unexpectedly, news came over the radio that the Axis were not undefeatable. The poor, ill-equipped Greeks, with no tanks or air force, did not capitulate to the Axis. They refused to join the alliance, and instead fought the invaders with a combination of insane fury and calculated military tactics. Soon Mussolini was in full retreat through Albania, and, while the Greeks would ultimately be overcome months later by the full force of the German military, their fierce resistance was an inspiration to the British and to the world, and the cause of the catastrophic delay in Germany's invasion of Russia.

It is interesting that, while Corelli's Mandolin stirred profoundly patriotic feelings in me, almost all of the negative reviews have come from other Greeks. While those readers suggest that their concerns are with such minutiae the novel's inaccurate use of the plural for coffee shop ("kaphenia") where the singular ("kaphenio") is intended, and the use of the term "Cyrillic" for the Greek alphabet, when the Cyrillic alphabet was derived from the Greek alphabet (which is called just that) by St. Cyrus in his efforts to Christianize the Slavs, I suspect that their actual problem with the novel is its unflattering portrayal of the Communist arm of Greek resistance, which, after the Germans retreated, plunged Greece into a brutal civil war. The post-World War II era has seen unbounded glorification of these "freedom fighters" by the Greek left. However, De Bernieres is not alone in his analysis; virtually every outside observer (e.g., Nicholas Gage's "Eleni") is in agreement with the depiction of the Greek Communists in Corelli's Mandolin. Greece is perhaps the only country where the Cold War is still being (internally) fought, and the Greeks are consequently notoriously intolerant of views inconsistent with their own on such matters. It is perhaps the same spirit and fury which De Bernieres has so beautifully captured which so inflames Greek readers of Corelli's Mandolin; for us, "objectivity is impossible". I am therefore pleased to learn that the rest of the world, at least, is able to read and appreciate this novel as a great literary work.

Louis de Bernieres is a great novelist. He does with Corelli's Mandolin what every novelist tries to do, or at least should try to do, namely to evoke an elevating change in the reader. We have all had the experience of finishing a book and not wanting to let go of the characters or the places. We want to hold onto them, to visit with them, to taste once again the aroma of their lives, the texture of their voices, the sounds of the world in which they live. I can't think when this complex state of mind ever tugged at me as hard as when I closed the pages of Berniers' book. The characters are the three dimensional figures about which E. M. Forster wrote in Aspects of the Novel. As you meet them on the two-dimensional page you can almost walk around them, so deeply and humanly are they portrayed. And the backdrop consists of the the darkening shadow of the Nazi transformation of Europe as it descends on Aegean civilization and trashes the innocence of its people. So character and culture collide with a combination of gravity and levity that is simply impossible to put into words. I resist saying anything of the details of this work for fear that it will tarnish the experience of the book. Its most wonderful feature is that it evokes deep emotions in the reader (at least in me) and elevates the spirit as a result. One is changed through reading it, in a rich way, somewhat the way a Greek tragedy may embrace the audience and raise it to a new level. I am moved to say that if you have only one book to read this next year, read this one.

Wow. I just finished this book today, and must say that I'm overwhelmed by the experience. Corelli's Mandolin was selected by a book club that I'm in; I don't think that I would have read it otherwise because books and movies about wartime tend to sadden me too much. As did this one, but it was well worth it. I've seen many synopses that paint the novel as a story of a woman torn between two men, and that's not really accurate at all. The book is so much more broad than that, and Pelagia, the book's heroine, never actually debates which man to "choose."

I learned so much about the history of Greece by reading Corelli's Mandolin; it really is a historical novel. De Bernieres paints the atrocities of war so clearly that there were a few passages in the book where, I must admit, I cried. Hard. Very few books are able to illicit that sort of emotion from me, but this one definitely did me in. The writing is phenomenal; De Bernieres has a true gift of creating pictures for his readers with his words. Each character is finely chiseled out, clear and immensely memorable. I'm planning to recommend this one to everyone that I know; I read constantly, but I have a feeling it's going to be a while before I come across another book so intense. Very highly recommended.

I have owned this novel for four years, but did not read it until this past week. I wanted to avoid having anything about the movie (likely to be simplified and sentimental) to ruin the reading of this. I can say that 'Corelli's Mandolin' is a first-rate novel, a cut above anything that passes for literature in Oprahfied America these days. It's moving, powerful and sad, and should open most any reader's eyes to the horrors of WWII, perpetrated in this case by Germans, Greeks, Italians and most anyone who chose to fight.

But the heart of 'Coreeli's Mandolin' is in the language, the way de Bernieres uses language and action to show the various ways in that love may take form. Whether it's the doomed Carlo, never to have his affections returned in the way he needs, or Pelagia, whose love for Corelli is a temptestous storm of conflicting desire, this novel is never off the mark in its ability to make you feel the longing and sadness of what love cannot overcome: death, betrayal, the passing of the years. More than any other novel I have read since 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being,' there is at the heart of 'Corelli's Mandolin' an example of a true and perfect love: that between Dr. Iannis and Pelagia, his daughter. What he passes on to her is the invaluable gift that ideally every parent may give to his or her child. I'll say no more so that a new reader may enjoy this novel, at once a treaty on the nature of the heart, the indiminishable bond of family and a chilling reminder of the costs of war.