This was a very unique story both in style and language. There was a quirky type of wordiness and humor that was slowly seductive if the reader could be receptive and willing to go for the ride.
The story begins in 1940 in Ceppalonia Greece, a small island described by Dr. Iannis as being full of magic and light. The first few chapters are written in the first person and are a kind of preamble to the plot. The viewpoints are Italian and Greek and are written from the point of view of an Italian closeted homosexual soldier, Benito Mussolini the Fascist dictator, Dr. Iannis the Greek doctor, and the Greek priest. The Italians are planning to invade Italy and attempt to make it look like the attack was provoked by the British.
Ultimately they are successful and the Italians occupy the island along with some German allies. The Captain in command, Antonio Correlli, is a musician at heart. He usurps the home of Dr. Iannis as his headquarters and gradually falls in love with Pelagia, the doctor's daughter and only child. Their love story forms the main plot but their are several subplots that engage the reader and blend together to form a type of crazy quilt, one that works even though, at first glance, seem not to quite match up. More than once I wondered where the author was going with this plotline....only to discover that I just needed to have faith. It all worked.
What is special is the language and the style. The words are poetic and descriptive and the style sings..clearly the author's intention. Although this is a love story there are brutally descriptive passages on war, cruelty and death that are among the most guesome I have ever read. Yet there is this underlying magic...
One of my favorite quotations is this advice the widowed Dr. Iannis gives to his daughter:

"When you fall in love, it is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake and then it subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because that is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the desire to mate every second of the day......Love itself is what's left over, when being in love has burned away"

When I was living in Cuba, books in English were a precious commodity amongst the expat community. You read them, you passed them on - when you went home, you left them behind for those who would come after you. An American artist - one of many that passed through our lives - left me her doggy, much-read copy of Captain Corelli's Mandolin, exhorting me to read it; it was `incredible, unbelievable, the greatest book she'd ever read'. I had three attempts at it but never made it past page 30. It found it much too wordy, overblown, overwritten, annoying.

Two years later and I saw it again, the same edition with the blue and cream cover, half-price in WH Smiths at Manchester Piccadilly station. I was off to a friend's for the weekend and bought it to read on the train. I got about forty pages in before I abandoned it again. I left that copy with my friend, who's never managed to get through it either.

A few more years passed and I saw it in a jumble sale, the spine unbroken, apparently unread. It sat on my shelf until a couple of weeks ago when I heard Louis de Bernieres on Midweek, with Libby Purvis and my thoughts strayed to my still un-read copy. This time I was determined, whatever it took, to see it through to the bitter end.

I still struggled through the first chapters; they are overwritten; tediously wordy - never use one word where you can cram in a paragraph of adverbs.

Everything changes on page 57. Carlo is the best of this novel. From the moment he enters the story with his heartbreaking, impossible love for Francesco, it's like calming, fragrant oils have been poured on the story's choppy waters; the style settles and a plot suddenly emerges.

Corelli is a magnificent creation; the Italians in general lift the thing and send it spinning like a master pizza maker with his dough. For the entire central section of the book, I was enthralled (though I have to add, I thought Mandras was a cruelly mistreated character, Pelagia was a cow where he was concerned. My heart truly bled for him and his fate).

You could have cut the entire last third; Once Corelli leaves and the Germans take over, it's a picture left out in the rain; all the colour and life drained away and - I know it's describing a dire time of cruelty and hardship but that's not why it falls down here, I honestly think the author lost interest once his beloved Italians were out of the picture. The rest is just a downwards roll to the finale. It could all have been broken down to a chapter or two and the book would have been greatly enhanced by that because it seems to me that LdB had pretty much lost the will to live by then.

And then we reach the ending which was pants. Such a disappointment; improbable, out of character in my opinion. A huge anticlimax.

To summarise, it's a book of three parts; the beginning is annoyingly wordy, the ending disappointing and dull. Well worth the trouble of reading for the middle, which is joyous, beautiful, wonderful.

In short, nowhere near as bad as I'd feared, but nowhere near as good as it had the potential to be.

Yazarın muzip dili sonradan okuru gafil avlıyor, hikaye gittikçe ağırlaşıyor o tatlı ruhunu kaybediyor, benimsemekte hiçbir sıkıntı yaşamadığımız bu tatlı atmosferin stabil kalmasını daha çok isterdim ancak en nihayetinde WWII dönem kitabı olduğu için değişimlerin nedenini anlıyorum bu yüzden kıyamıyorum puan kırmaya.

Doktor başta olmak üzere karakterlerin her biri çok başarılı aktarılmış. Kasaba desen sanki bir sonraki adımın seni oraya götürecekmiş gibi gerçekçi.
Deniz kıyısının ılık rüzgarları.
Gerisi savaş ve bize getirdiklerinden çok götürdükleriyle ilgili.

This is the best book I have read all year -- and I've read some good ones since starting on my reading binge. The characters are absolutely wonderful, from the village strongman to the crazy priest to the good doctor to even the pine marten. The book evokes such beautiful images of Cephallonia and Greece that it is hard to believe it also evokes such horrendous gut-wrenching images of warfare. Its commentary on history is at once hilarious and quakingly spot on. Really, really fantastically written, with beautiful and many times ridiculously awesome language. It had me gasping, frowning, smiling, laughing, and frantically turning pages. The book leaves me desperately wanting to go to Greece... and to buy my own copy of the book.

This is a meaty, sweeping, witty, and romantic story about one of the more literarily-neglected corners of World War II, the involvement of Italy and Greece and the occupation by the former of the latter.

The action centers on the Greek island of Cephalonia, where the village doctor, Iannis, tends to the ailments of the locals and raises his beautiful and intelligent daughter, Pelagia. Pelagia's bethrothed, Mandras, disappears into the war, and when he returns, Pelagia no longer loves him, so he departs again, this time to take up with the Greek Communist resistance, where the brutality of his comrades changes him forever. Meanwhile, an Italian regiment imposes a benevolent occupation in Cephalonia, with their charming Captain, a mandolin player and composer, quartered in the doctor's home. Love, of course, blooms, but the realities of war, politics, and even natural disasters mean that the course of love will not run smooth, and not everyone will emerge unscathed.

The storytelling moves with agility from one perspective to another, including an interior monologue of Mussolini's, soldiers' diaries and letters, pamphlets, and Iannis' life's work of a very opinionated and personal history book. The settings are brilliantly described, the horrors of war and terror not whitewashed, yet the story has an overall feeling of goodness and romantic glow about it. But it's not sappy, either. There is plenty of good sharp wit and eroticism to keep things moving.

Update, 11 July 2020, The Movie:

Shawn Slovo was the screen writer responsible for transforming Bernières novel into the two-hour movie. For the first two-thirds of the movie, in a manner very similar to the novel, Slovo does a remarkable job of boiling the book down to it's main theme of impossible love. It's the final third, of the movie that Slovo could not come to terms with. The movie quickly degrades at this point into action sequences that make little sense and an ending that is also less than captivating.

---

Book Review 2 July 2020:

There are countless books like Corelli’s Mandolin: boy meets girl, love ensues, and consequences abound. But Corelli’s Mandolin goes much farther in its embrace of love than most stories that follow that simple path.

Corelli’s Mandolin is a story about the vastness of love. It brings to life the power that love has over humans who were created to heed its call. Bernières depicts love as a force that pushes us forward on multiple paths as we move through our days. We propose to one another, we go to work, we fight wars, and we take revenge all because of love. All of this is included in Corelli’s Mandolin, which provides an opportunity to think about love in this larger context and to ponder the reasons for our own acts and the acts of those around us.

The flaw in this book is that its intensity runs out long before the book actually ends. Bernières spends 350 pages in developing a story about love that truly reached my heart. This main part of the book delicately covers a handful of years during WWII in a remote corner of the war under strangely unique circumstances that were endured by wonderfully unique characters. Then those years come to an end. Had the book ended at this point it could have captured the power of this story between its two covers.

But unfortunately, the book continues on for another 100 pages and does so with a change in both tone and time. Gone are the intricate interactions between characters. Decades of time rush by while contemporary Greek history is half-heartedly covered. Bernières then delivers his real ending that’s a bit insulting to reason as well as to the power of love; and by that time, the magic of those first 350 pages has faded away.

I must admit I was slow to warm up to this novel. de Berniere's prose are beautiful, dramatic, and flow so smoothly that I felt compelled to forge through his initial meanderings. Once the characters sprang to life I was enraptured, if not obsessed with their happenings and felt as if I was part of their lives. This may be the only downfall of reading such an enchanting tale.... I was compelled to read into the wee hours of the morning unable to rest the book upon my nightstand! And I cried when it was finished. I don't remember what enticed me to read this heretofore unknown author's tale, but I'm so happy that I have had the experience!

"Corelli's Mandolin" is, like "The English Patient", a literate historical romance. It also manages to be a highbrow page-turner, with equal doses of wit and pathos to go with the romance.

Lyrical. Took my breath away and broke my heart. Greece. War. Decency of soldiers. Indecency of war. Monsters. Humans. Where. Cats. Young girl's bed. Old woman's dream. Ending. And of course the Mandolin. Did I mention, Greece ? It is never too late. Love may get ole but if it is real then it's never forgotten nor forgiven. It can survive a war, it did and it survived them, in spite of each other. It survived the shuffle in the company of humans.

♥ ♥ ♥ Jedna z najkrajších kníh ktorá sa mi kedy dostala do rúk. Ide o nádherný romanticko-tragický príbeh dvoch mladých ľudí odohrávajúci sa na pozadí dejín samotného ostrova Kefalónia. Čitateľa na jednej strane rozosmeje len preto, aby ho hneď na ďalšej rozplakala. Kto chce vtipnú, krásnu, ironickú, zábavnú, ale zároveň aj vážnu a drsnú knihu je povinný prečítať si práve toto. Ďakujem za odporučenie a odporúčam ďalej. ♥ ♥ ♥

I went into this one with low expectations... and probably remain sitting on the fence. Some people love it, others seem to detest it. For me - neither.
(Bit spoilery from here on, but it is based on History, so hopefully most people know a bit about this).
For the first part of the story, set realistically in Cephalonia, the largest of the Ionian Islands off Greece in 1941, tells of the Italian and German occupation. It is a relatively peaceful time - the Italians are peaceful and respectful of the Greeks, who are reluctantly led to like some of the soldiers. The main Italian characters are likeable and quite well padded out.
After Italy surrenders to the Allies, the Germans take over and start enforcing a more strict and violent control. The Italians resist the German reinforcements, and are slaughtered by the more powerful Germans with more powerful weaponry.
And finally the Americans arrive to mop up the Germans and bring freedom to Cephalonia, only for the Greeks to commence a civil war in which the Partisans followed the example of the Germans with violence and punishments of the already downtrodden people.

At this point in the novel, all of the characters had been well formed and their stories woven with the facts. But it is here that the novel speeds up - the core character family goes through some changes, a generation is added, then another. It is here that many of the readers become dissatisfied with the story, and I can appreciate why - it really does make a change.

At the end there are loose ends tied up, and while it is not a happily ever after ending, and potentially can be seen as a story of wasted opportunities, at least it wasn't a saccharine Hollywood ending.

There were some very well written parts - particularly the tormented war scenes. Some of the events were really sad, and the author didn't dumb down the gutless violence of slaughter and cruelty. I probably enjoyed this book more than I initially expected.

I haven't seen the film - and probably won't go looking for it. I am not a huge Nic Cage fan, and I can't really see Penelope Cruz in the character I built in my mind.

3.5 stars, rounded down.

Whew, and that is the last of my catchup reviews from my holiday... return to normal service now, and due to 'working from home' and high immersion with my family, that has turned out to be less-reading-than-normal, rather than the more-reading-than-normal that I anticipated!

Wow the end is completely different from this one in the movie.. sad in a way..