Corelli's Mandolin

Louis De Bernières

Pantheon Books, 1994 - Fiction - 437 pages

The Greek island of Cephallonia - peaceful, remote, famed for its beauty, its light, its mythic history - and only just beginning to enter the twentieth century when the tide of World War II rolls onto its shores. This is the setting for Louis de Bernieres's lyrical, heartbreaking, and hilarious chronicle of the days and nights of the island's inhabitants over fifty tumultuous years. "It was an island filled with gods," writes Dr. Iannis, Cephallonia's healer and fledgling historian. And though the people who fill the island in 1940 may be less divine than their Olympian forebears, they are nonetheless divinely human, and none more so than the doctor's daughter, Pelagia. Willful, proud, independent, and beautiful, Pelagia finds herself between two men: Mandras, a handsome young fisherman, besotted with love for her but determined to permanently secure her love (and a dowry from her father) by finding "something to get to grips with" when he joins the resistance; and Captain Corelli, a charming, mandolin-playing, exceedingly reluctant officer of the Italian garrison that establishes the Axis presence on the island. Corelli is thought slightly mad in his passion for music and the gentleness of his troops' "occupation" of Cephallonia. Yet his madness quickly begins to make life seem more "various, rich, and strange" for everyone who encounters him - especially, and most confusingly, for Pelagia... But with the arrival of the Germans and then of the Communists, life on the island becomes more chaotic and barbaric, more certainly a part of the process by which "history repeats itself, first as tragedy, and then again as tragedy." Pelagia's life, once rife with possibility, an idyll of time, becomes a long search for something fine and lasting amid loss and separation, deprivation and fear. Her story of love found and changed and misplaced, and the story of the life she shares with the people of Cephallonia - a life permanently altered by the war and its brutal aftermath, by the vagaries of nature, time, and "progress" - add up to an epic tale of tenderness and tenacity in an age of barbarism. Corelli's Mandolin is a novel of infinite humanity and prodigious imagination, of dazzling humor and farce. It is the work of a brilliantly gifted writer.

Contents

• Dr Iannis Commences his History and is Frustrated: 1
• The Duce: 8
• The Strongman: 16

About the author

Louis de Bernières was born on December 8, 1954, in England to a military family. He spent four months in the British army in his late teens. When he was nineteen, he spent a year in Colombia where he wrote a short story about a true incident of violence that occurred there. Fifteen years later, while recuperating from a motorcycle accident, de Bernières used that short story as the basis for the first volume of his Latin American Trilogy, The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts, Senor Vivo and the Coca Lord, and The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman. In the 1980s, de Bernières worked as an auto mechanic and then as a supply teacher in London. In 1993 he took a holiday on the Greek island of Cephallonia. That became the setting for Captain Correlli's Mandolin, a novel of war, love, and heroism, which remained on the (London) Times bestseller list for four years. It has sold more than 600,000 copies, has been reprinted in paperback more than thirty times, and has been translated into more than seventeen languages.The book also won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book. It was also shortlisted for the 1994 Sunday Express Book of the Year. De Bernières was named one of Granta's 20 Best British Novelists in 1993, and Author of the Year 1998 by England's Publishing News. He will be give the opening night address at the 2015 Melbourne Writers Festival. His title The Dust that Falls from Dreams made the New Zealand Best Seller List in 2015

Bibliographic information

• Title: Corelli's Mandolin; Tom Keneally Centre Research Collection; Vintage International
• Author: Louis De Bernières
• Edition: reprint
• Publisher: Pantheon Books, 1994
• ISBN: 0679436448, 9780679436447
• Length: 437 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / Historical / General; Fiction / War & Military