Corelli's Mandolin - book

Corelli’s Mandolin, by Louis de Bernieres (Vintage International, 1994).

I rarely read novels anymore, but having time while trying to recover from a terrible bout of Strep Throat, I read this one. Having read it, I decided to comment on it, although it is now some fifteen years old and has been widely reviewed and praised. It has also been translated into more than fifteen languages and was also made into a motion picture.

If you read the comments from various sources, you will find the book has virtually everything: “Brims with all the grand topics of literature – love and death, heroism and skullduggery, humor and pathos, not to mention art and religion…” Then more: “de Bernieres dances nimbly from bawdy humor through parody, satire, chronicle, idyll, romantic comedy and epic chant.” Still more: “His work encompasses cruelty, humor, love and friendship, hope and horror…”
It seems virtually nothing is left out of this tour de force of a novel and it has received high praise indeed. It has within it everything mentioned above and more. It offers a most interesting look at the Italian occupation of Greece as well as some observations on Italian, Greek, and German military prowess and interaction. There is a humorous and rather insulting portrait of Mussolini as well as a not very flattering picture of the Italian army. It features some marvelous characters. On the one hand it is a novel of considerable complexity, but the basic story is simple, revolving around four main characters: An intelligent and philosophical “doctor,” his beautiful and somewhat willful daughter, her Greek fisherman fiancé, and Captain Corelli, the mandolin playing Italian army officer who falls in love with her (the eternal triangle). There are other well-created but somewhat less important characters as well: A huge homosexual man who has to hide his sexuality and love, a physically unattractive older woman, the mother of the fiancé, a small girl who challenges the doctor to do things he would not otherwise do.

I confess that I truly enjoyed this book and it lived up to the descriptions of it above. I must also confess that I found it rather “weird,” for want of a better word. I think the reason for this may lie in the fact that the book does contain so many different themes and so many different styles or forms. For example, in the first chapter, and in other places also, I began to wonder if it was a serious novel being written in the style of Max Schulman. On a couple of occasions I wondered if the author was sitting there with his worn Thesaurus by his side. There were moments when I thought the humor was perhaps out of place or inappropriate. Sometimes I thought the author was trying to do too much in a single novel. At times it appeared to me the author was employing humor to compensate for the more horrific and realistic scenes that were to follow. I found it truly strange that the two leading men both disappeared from the text for a long time. The fiancé fights for the Greeks although we hear very little of him for long periods of time. His rival, Captain Corelli, also disappeared for quite a long time. One rather expected there would ultimately be a confrontation between the two, but conveniently, a contrived ending manages to solve this problem. I guess you might say the book has a happy ending, but it depends upon your particular interpretation. I thought it was a strange ending, having the two men appear as they did, having been gone so long, and I actually began to wonder if the author had actually planned it that way or just remembered to retrieve the two men at the last minute.

None of this kept me from enjoying the story and I believe I actually learned something from it, especially about a theatre of operations I knew little about. I also thought that many of the doctor’s observations on life and love and death were quite profound. As de Bernieres was both young and English when he produced this complex tale, he could have had little actual experience with either the characters or the situations. I am fascinated with how he managed to write such a remarkable tale and cannot help but wonder how it came about. I have not seen the movie but I believe this might be a case where the movie is better than the book, mostly because the movie would not be able to cope with the complexity of the book and thus would be a more straightforward and purer tale. My son, a true movie aficionado, assures me this is the case.