Stunning. Mesmerizing. Remarkable. Beautiful, beautiful love story. I just scanned the 121 books that I've already read belonging to 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die and there seem to be not too many books that could be considered as predominantly love stories. There is Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice but we all knew about it even before actually reading the book so there was no element of surprise. There is Haruki Murakami's Sputnik Sweetheart but it has fantasy interwoven in the story like people disappearing in trees, people being transformed while riding a ferris wheel, etc. so it is not a straightforward pure honest love story. Also Sputnik fell out from the list in its 2010 version.

Set in the beautiful island of Cephallonia (now Kefalonia) in Greece during World War II, Louis de Bernieres' (British, born 1954) Captain Corelli's Mandolin, first published in 1993, sizzles with love, music and honesty. Love here is not just the usual erotic love between a man and a woman. The main protagonist, the beautiful Pelagia is in love with the handsome gentleman, Mandras who joins the Greek guerilla. Then Pelagia meets the mandolin-playing Italian captain, Corelli and falls love for him too. Theirs is a forbidden love since Pelagia is still betrothed to Mandras and Corelli is an Italian whose country is at war with Greece and the Allies. Although living in the same house, they choose not to make love so as not to complicate the situation. When they say their dreams they are always prefixed with "After the war...". Love so painfully forbidden yet so pure and honest. Right love in a wrong place and time.

The other love is fatherly love between Pelagia and her doctor-father, Dr. Iannis. Theirs is a nurturing love based on respect and trust. There is a scene where Dr. Iannis is telling Pelagia that he sees the love blossoming between Pelagia and Corelli. He does not condone it. He just gives the consequences of continuing that love. Pelagia takes it maturely. When the time comes that my own daughter falls in love with a man, I hope I'll have the same fortitude and maturity that Dr. Iannis has in that scene. Powerful.

The last significant love that this novel includes is the homosexual heroic love that Carlo, one of the Greek soldiers, has to his fellow but subordinate soldier, Francesco. Carlo keeps his love within himself (they are in the Army so that kind of love is taboo). When the latter dies, Carlo is devastated because he failed to save him. Then Carlo meets Corelli who is his superior. This time he shields his body that spared Corelli's life during the Aqui Massacre (September 1943) when German soldiers killed by open fire 400,000+ Italian soldiers. This was the time when Germany was about to lose the war to Allies and they went into killing sprees everywhere in Europe. That historical scene is depicted in details in this book that you will surely feel numbed to read another gigantic monstrosity the Germans did during WWII.

I spent 4 days reading this 436-page book. It's an easy read and I could have normally finished this in 2-3 days but Bernieres' prose is so delectable that I decided to savor each word closing the book every now and then and imagine myself in that island, hearing the music of mandolin and seeing the face of the sumptuous Penelope Cruz (who played the role of Pelagia in the 2001 film based on this book).

I have the pirated copy of that film. Many years ago, when I tried viewing it, I stopped after 5-10 minutes. It was boring. Now that I've read and liked the book, I should dig my cabinets and give it another chance. I just think that the balding Nicholas Cage was a miscast as Corelli. BTW, De Bernières strongly disapproved of the film version, commenting, "It would be impossible for a parent to be happy about its baby's ears being put on backwards." He does however state that it has redeeming qualities, and particularly likes the soundtrack.

My lawyer-brother says that the books belonging to 501 Must Read Books (yes that's another list and this book is in there too) are those that are controversial and not necessarily well-written. After this book's publication in 1993, the island of Kefalonia became one of the island tourist destinations in Greece. Also, obviously, this is well-written and as it also landed #19 (among 200 listed) in Big Read, the 2004 survey done in UK where people voted for their favorite novels.

Maybe writing about Alabat island, where I grew up, in Quezon will not be a bad idea. Oh maybe someday.

I first read this book in 1994, not long after my first daughter was born. It was that book that everyone seemed to be reading - and deservedly so, because it is as rich, detailed, panoramic and insightful as any of the great classics. I reread it this week because I was visiting Kefalonia (or Cephallonia) - the largest of the Ionian Islands in western Greece. Kefalonia in the summer of 2017 is an idyllic place: peaceful, clean, sparsely populated, and graced with the clearest, bluest water I've ever seen. It is hard to imagine the island as a crossroads for various invaders (Venetian and Turkish being the primary ones); it is even more difficult to imagine it as the scene of bloody atrocities during World War II as described in this book.

The book begins with the self-taught Dr Iannis performing a slightly ludicrous surgery - he is extracting an ancient pea from an old man's eardrum - and working on his history of the island. The new History of Cephallonia is proving to be a difficult project because Dr. Iannis cannot seem to write it without "the intrusion of his own feelings and prejudices." "This island betrays its own people in the mere act of existing," Dr. Iannis writes, at the historical moment when Greece is about to be invaded by Italy and dragged unwillingly into the war. There are many voices in this book - it is written from the viewpoint of multiple perspectives, including that of The Duce (Mussolini) - but the voice of Dr Iannis is the closest we get to a broader authorial perspective. Ironic, excoriating, tender in turn, the voice of the doctor sets the tone for the book. He diagnoses, not just the human body and its idiosyncrasies and failings, but also the human spirit.

Not long ago a friend and I were debating what makes a book an enduring classic . . . what sets it apart from being just a good story for its particular moment in time. We agreed that the great novels all seem to employ a kind of micro/macro strategy. The reader connects to a small set of characters, and their particular dramas are set against a broad sweep of history. The doctor, his beautiful daughter Pelagia and the Italian soldier who is billeted with them give the novel its intimate focus, but in another sense this is a war novel on a grand scale.

My daughter (19) also read this book while we were on holiday in Kefalonia, and much of the history it recounts was completely unknown to her. The war, all of the horror and absurdity of it and all of the senseless waste of lives, is still a subject of fresh outrage to her and she raged about the 'stupid pointlessness' of it all. But as with Catch-22 - another great novel about WWII - the narrative sets human stupidity, callousness and folly against acts of true kindness and nobility. At one point, Dr Iannis tries to explain to Captain Corelli that there are two Greeks inside of his daughter (and every Greek person) - not so different from the good and bad angel idea. But so much of what is specifically Greek in nature and culture to this book has a larger truth to it.

3.5*
Mislila sam da je nikad neću završiti. Zaista jedna fenomenalna knjiga koja je previše dugačka i bespotrebno naporno napisana. Lično mi je najveći problem taj što autor nije mogao da se odluči da li piše istorijsku knjigu ili ljubavnu priču, obe teme idu u ekstrem- istorija je previše istorijski napisana, a ljubavni delovi su previše "ljubavni" odnosno naivni, patetični itd. pogotovo na kraju.

S druge strane, sjajno prikazana istorija Grčke za vreme i nakon 2. svetskog rata i nekoliko baš odličnih misli.

First off...I don't know why this says the title is "Captain Corelli's Mandolin" when I'm staring at the book and it's clearly "Corelli's Mandolin." The "Captain" was added for the movie, but I can't find a correct link for the purposes of Goodreads.
First off, let me state that the movie was terrible, so don't go by that. Give this book a chance! It will make you laugh/cry/sigh/think. It really is in my top 5 books of all time. It was a really beautiful story set against the backdrop of WWII. I love how much it made me laugh. Don't get me wrong, it's not a laugh riot through and through, but what de Bernieres does exceptionally well is make you laugh when you are least expecting to. :) I. Love. This. Book. Is that coming across? ;)

Funny story: My friend, Anke, who is German, was in town when the movie came out and we were trying to decide what to go see and she stated that she liked Nicholas Cage, so we opted for that. Well, I am an idiot. I had completely forgotten that this book is not at all kind to the Germans (justifiably). While the movie was awful, it was not made any better by my extreme discomfort at basically bringing up a major blight on my very good and kind friend's national history for two hours. While *those* Germans made bad choices, she had nothing to do with it. I felt awful! :( But, she forgave me, because she's cool like that. :)

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.

4.5 stars really.

Thank goodness I was able to read this without imagining Penelope Cruz and Nicholas Cage as the characters (it helps that I never saw the movie). Penelope as a Greek beauty just doesn't work for me.

I really enjoyed this book...I loved that it was more than a love story between a man and a woman, but also between father and daughter, man/woman and country and between friends and honor.

I am a sucker for historical writing...I loved that de Bernieres addressed the emotionality that is inherent in writing a history. Can anyone ever really be emotionally removed from history? I don't think so. But, maybe that is just me.

I don't often reread books, but, first of all, I realised that it's been nearly twenty-five years since I originally read this (which is mildly terrifying), and second of all the chance to read it while I was on Cephalonia seemed too good to pass up. And it was a transcendent experience to be able to walk along the seafront of Argostoli (where I could imagine Pelagia's grandchildren had one of their souvenir shops) and past the little monument to the fallen soldiers of the Acqui division, where you could connect fiction to historical and geographical reality in a visceral way.

I loved this when I first read it as a teenager, though I didn't know much about the history behind the story. This time round, I was even more impressed by how brilliantly de Bernières combines interpersonal drama and historical exposition by means of that finger-snapping, multilingual prose style. It's all done with a massive dose of chutzpah, not just in de Bernières's willingness to appropriate the voice and feelings of people living in a very different country and time (for which, inevitably, he drew criticism from some quarters), but also in his willingness to ventriloquise so many specific historical figures, from Mussolini and the Greek dictator Metaxas to a host of minor (but real) ambassadors and military commanders, many of whom I was reading about recently in books of Greek history.

In fact it's the chutzpah that lets him get away with it: even at his most controversial, there is always a sense of heartfelt stylistic exercise to his writing, a conviction that his intent is as much playful as it is serious. I realise now, looking back, how much of an impression this left on me, and how much I measured other writers by this ability to enter into ‘foreign’ societies and mindsets, and to balance comic elements with moments of extreme tragedy.

Violence in de Bernières (at its most extreme, I think, in the nightmarish male-on-female mutilation of Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord) is often shocking but it never has the bleakness of, say, some of the passages in Cormac McCarthy, despite an outlook that can be equally pessimistic. (‘History repeats itself, first as tragedy, and then again as tragedy,’ he writes here.) Somehow the blackness of his stated outlook is contradicted by the wit and fizz of his prose style. He seems motivated not by despair but by a steely sense of outrage – he shocks you with the air of trying to slap awake someone in a burning building. Behind everything is this tremendous sense of wise, well-travelled humanism (embodied in this novel by Dr Iannis, one of the great characters of modern fiction) which I find more inspiring than ever when I think about how little I've encountered it in other writers since.

Back in the day, the consensus on this was that it was let down by the ending, which I'm now going to talk about briefly, so feel free to stop if you haven't read it. After spending three hundred and fifty pages to describe the four years of Axis occupation, he spends the final fifty pages racing through four entire decades. The effect is, indeed, a little jarring, but it always worked really well for me as a way of squaring the circle a writer is faced with in a book like this. After a military occupation, a brutal civil war and a colossal natural disaster, it would have been not just saccharine but offensive to have our romantic leads come together in a happy ending. It was something I was very aware of when I read it the first time: how's he going to end this? To crush their dreams would seem unbearably cruel, but to fulfil them would seem a betrayal, or at least an undercutting, of the tragedy of the historical experiences the book has been trying to evoke. De Bernières's solution is to locate a happy ending of sorts, but to position it outside the actual parameters of the story. He says, in effect: you want a happy ending? Fine – but no cheating. You'll have to wait half a century to earn it.

Far from being out of place, it's this final flourish that reinforces the sense you get from the whole book, and from a lot of his writing, that he is determined to offer up as much hope and happiness as possible – but not to offer more than history justifies.

What de Bernieres does so well is paint a picture of contrast. He inserts the reader into a simple Greek village of contented people only to have it torn apart by politics, prejudices, and megalomaniacs, thus turning the populace into victims.

de Bernieres’ humor includes sharp mockery of invading governments. The village residents and the Italian, German, and communist characters are complex and evolving. With clearly drawn landscapes and climate of Cephalonia Island, one is envious of those who swim with dolphins and sing with the boys of La Scala. In contrast, the historical context of the story is grim and tragic.

I have a small quibble with a weak ending, but this beautiful story deserves a strong 5 stars.

P.S. Except for the names, characters and the basic setting, this book bears no similarity to the film version of the same.

I just finished reading Captain Corelli's Mandolin, an award winning book and rightly so, by Louis de Bernieres. The story is about love and loss and the ultimate survival of human spirit and how the worst of times bring out the best in us and also the worst. This inspiring and very informative tale is of a strong woman, Pelagia, living with her father Dr. Iannis, a compassionate healer and rationalist. Set in the backdrop of the second world war, this story will make you cry and lose faith in humanity only to be reinstated later. Like Captain Corelli's music this story is poetic in its highs and lows strumming across the perfect detailed descriptions unfolding the plot and tying the elements together perfectly in the end.
Those who have read 'A thousand splendid suns' by Khalid Hosseini will like reading it and may find certain similarities in the grimness of war; however, the infectious happiness and enthusiasm and hope it fills you up with at the end, unlike the former will make it a long but enjoyable read. For those who cannot deal with grief, avoid reading it but with a warning that you will miss out on a very wonderful experience if you do so. Like certain experiences that become a part of you, this book too has the potential to become a part of you forever.

É um excelente livro, este. Acabei-o por entre risos e lágrimas (pois sou daquelas que choram no cinema e nos livros...). Foi, sem dúvida, um dos melhores livros que li ultimamente. Conjuga uma história muito envolvente com um relato histórico (Segunda Grande Guerra) e a única parte de que não gostei tanto, foram os capítulos dedicados ao Duce, que me pareceram demasiado longos e exagerados (embora admita que façam justiça à verdade, uma vez que, ao que parece, o homem era mesmo doido varrido).

الحب جنون مؤقت يفور كالبركان ثم يخمد
الحب ليس انخطاف الانفاس؛بل هو الجذور التي تبقي عقب انخطاف الأنفاس

ميلودراما رومانسية حربية في عصر الحرب العالمية الثانية؛

بيلاجيا شابة يونانية ريفية مخطوبة تقع في حب ظابط ايطالي مرح شخصيته اكبر من الحياة
  ليبدا مثلث حب مستحيل بين الاغريق و الرومان

صدرت الرواية في منتصف التسعينات و تلاها الفيلم مباشرة
لكن اختلاف النهاية بينهما يثير جدلا طويلا الي اليوم؛

في الرواية تمنتع بلاجيا عن الزواج و تصبح طبيبة و لا يوافيها كابتن كوريلي الا بعد اربعين سنة! من اللقاء الاول؛
بينما الفيلم اعاده لها سريعا ؛ ففرغ مضمون النهاية تماما من الرومانسية المجردة التي تميز بلاجيا

I adored this book. I fell in love with all the words and the beautiful way they all fit together.

But, I do need to say, all the people that I recommended the book to, and the people that I know read the book, did not feel at all the same way.

In addition, the movie was all wrong.


Here is what I wrote about the book when I first read it:

An intelligent, heart pounding, gut wrenching book about a small island in Greece in World War 2. The island is occupied by the fascist Italians and some of Hitler's Nazis.

The story is about the island, it's people, the events during and after the war. It is also a story of forbidden love, loss and the extreme love of friendships.

Excellent!