Corelli's Mandolin

Rating:
Summary: Incredible story, but disappointing ending
Review: I very much loved this book. It surprised me to no end, until I came to the end. I would have to agree with two other reviewers that the ending was very disappointing. It was rather formulaic and smacked of a hastily rewritten ending. I agreed with Pelagia's initial sentiments at the end of the book (which I can't reveal), but anyone who has and will read the book will understand. But the ride to the end of the book was thrilling and being one who knows little about WWII in the mediterranean, it was very refreshing (although I have read other reviewer's who take de Bernieres to task for historical inaccuracies). In any event the lost star was for the ending, but the other four stars are for the excellent story - I definitely recommend this book.

Rating:
Summary: I've just finished reading it, and I miss the characters!!!
Review: Bernieres tells you everything, not only those facts that have a meaning for later events.Thoroughly realistic and with a touch of magic, it made me laugh and cry, sometimes simultaneously. I want more!!!

Rating:
Summary: Wonderful writing, but a believable view of the universe?
Review: Captain Corelli's Mandolin By Louis de Bernières

A Review

Ach well! Maybe I'm odd. Everybody else - and I mean everybody else - loves it! Thinks it's perfect! Goes into rhapsodies over it! Why can't I? I dunno. Which is a great starting-point for a review: scratching my head and lookin' stupid. I dunno. Maybe it's because I'm not literary. Ach No, there must be something else.

What?

Well, let's first look on the bright side. I loved some of the characters. Dr Iannis, for example, a lovely man, thoughtful and considerate, with a sense of fun: the perfect father, encouraging her, over the years, to be independent, to think for herself, regard herself as a person rather than accept the inferior status allocated by Greek island society to the females of the world. Hooray for Iannis and hooray for Pelagia's beauty and love of life. Hooray, too, for the hairy old female neighbour who turns out to be such a sterling friend, and for Carlo, the gentle giant who loves so undemandingly. Hoopla and hooray, also, for Corelli - a humorous and intelligently loving friend to all. While I am at it: hooray for de Bernières himself, for creating such a marvellous array of people. He can even see the good in Leutnant Günter Weber, a reluctant, spineless er (I hope I do not reveal too much) and excuses the later excesses of the once beautiful Mandras. The author also forgives the mistakes and stupidity of Italian and Greek leaders. By contrast the barbarous activities of German soldiers are pitilessly exposed, along with the ruthless duplicity of the Greek Communist Party. It is when he launches into narrative, tells the story, that de Bernières is worth reading. His use of language is beautifully evocative. We can understand the tragedy and humour of each development, of each person he describes, and the relationship that exists and develops between each of them. I suppose it is the overall charity of outlook that is the main redeeming feature of the novel, and the power and humour of thought that lies behind much of the story telling is also a great and captivating strength.

Would be that Bernières had told the story in a more straightforward fashion. This is his strength, to be able to evoke images of people and their relationships. When the same power of imagination is applied, for example, to the creation of El Duce's interior monologue, I find myself bogged down. The story stops - in this case before it is properly started - and I, for one, would have been tempted to throw the book away without reading further (only the Librarian had said "Persevere through the first fifty pages!" - and I mostly do what Librarians say.) While the central elements of the story are compelling, humorous, horrifying and loving, the structure of the novel fails in a small number of important respects: - chunks of background information impede the story-telling. - the novel tails off with a hasty crowding together of thirty years or so of events following the end of the war, as if the writer had got bored with the whole thing. - the ending is just totally unbelievable. Its sentimentality undermines belief in the rest of the story. Historicity is questioned. Corelli is revealed as a romantic idiot (and I do not believe that he is!). Is it possible that all of the other characters are equally a romantic nothing, a projection of the author's attitude and personality? Are his creations projections of the author's view that there is no possibility of loving, normal fulfilment in this life? Is God - as accused by the effete and ultimately insane priest - the source of all of the evils and horrors that exist? Is there no loving fulfilment in the Universe? Is the only reason for existence the ephemera of youthful beauty? The last paragraph of the novel is surely a summation of the author's attitude towards the horrors and beauties that he has described so evocatively. He notes the careless and extravagant beauty of threegirls ".. slender golden thighs, new-grown , arcing eyebrows over black eyes, and long loose hair so dark it was almost blue."

This causes "a melody to rise up ..... something that captured the eternal spirit of Greece.."

Are these the only reasons for existence? Fleeting moments of youth and beauty?

Is there no true, eternal and loving God?

Rating:
Summary: Well written but totally inaccurate historically
Review: The fiction part of this novel is well written and entertaining. The history part of it is inaccurate and fully distorted by the personal views of the writer. He is assuming right and wrong based on his political philosophy. The explanation he gives on the author's note shows how partial he is. His historical knowledge is as accurate as saying that Britain is still an empire. He should stick to purely fictional novels.

Rating:
Summary: A wonderful historical novel
Review: I savored every word of this wonderful historical novel. Set on a small Greek island during World War 2, Corelli's Mandolin tells the story of the curious relationships that developed between occupying Axis forces and the island's proud inhabitants. Colorful characters, exciting events, and dramatic plot lines - all rendered in the author's rich, rich language (what a vocabulary!) - combine for splendid reading from beginning to end.

There's more than just great entertainment here, however, for the author has plenty to say about courage and culpability in wartime as well. At one point, a character in the book asserts that "history ought to consist only of the anecdotes of the little people who are caught up in it." I have my doubts about that statement, but I admit I smiled whenever the author mocked the grand statesmen of the era and their pretentious ideologies. The lesson of history, this novel insists, is that "we should care for each other more than we care for ideas, or else we will end up killing each other."

Rating:
Summary: superb book, but great shame about the rotten ending
Review: what spoils this book for me is the contrived and veryunconvincing ending. it strikes me that once again we have an authorwho has not had the strength of nerve to follow the internal logic of the book to the very end. another classic example of this syndrome is miss smilla's feeling for snow, which casts an almost magical spell over the reader for the first two thirds and then falls away sharply as it becomes clear that the author doesn't know how to end the book. for me, one of the main themes -- if the not the most important theme -- running through captain corelli's mandolin is the implicit message that you have to make the most of what you have today, because life is so arbitrary that disaster can strike any time, and usually does, especially in wartime. the author just about builds up enough sympathy for corelli to allow us to forgive him for the execution scene. for me, the book should have ended here, or once peace had broken out. of course we want to know what happened to corelli, but life isn't that neat, it's very chaotic, and had de bernieres followed the logic he created for the book -- the machinery which powers the plot along -- we would have been left wondering desperately what did happen to the (somewhat) one-dimensional but charming italian. to bring it all to neat end many years later, with every loose end tied up, just seems to be a cheap way out. i feel somewhat guilty carping on like this about what is in many ways an enchanting book, but i was deeply disappointed by the denouement. the bbc recently showed a documentary about de bernieres returning to cephallonia which featuerd various english celebrities talking about the book. theatre director richard eyre said he had given out over 100 copies to friends and acquantainces as a kind of test -- "I could not love anyone who did not love this book," he explained. this is a test i have used myself, but with another book, perhaps the greatest novel ever written -- "the master and margarita" by mikhail bulgakov. the huge unbridgeable chasm between the two books is that bulgakov sticks to his own rules to the very end and thereby produces something magical rather than something which is merely very good.

Rating:
Summary: "Be not cynical about love for it is perennial as the grass"
Review: This book made me think. My father says that he loves all the world, he sees this affection in shades of grey , I imagine his only grandchild to be a shade of charcoal verging on ebony, the mountains of Wales a darkening stormcloud , the spider fished from the bath a pearly lustre and the tax man the pallour of an oncoming coronary. I suspect Louis de Bernieres looks at things similarly in Captain Corelli's Mandolin. The world, as explored through the senses, is adored here in all its forms, light , landscape, food, water, the wholeness of the human heart and body when left undamaged .I love the section where the young Pelagia watches her beloved swimming naked and adores the lines of his terracotta splintered rear! This world is seen as worthy of love and the affirmation of such is the only sustaining path through terror. The interplay of power in the novel is complex, the solution to eternal problems simple and ultimately too demanding for many of us. The down trodden can defeat despair only by continuing to love, Carlo is ultimately undefeated because of the nature of his sacrifice. The powerful can resist corruption only by affirming love, Corelli is protected from the brutalising effect of war by recognising that the people of the occupied island are fundamentally identical to his own. The novel is given intricacy and savour by the under currents in the principle relationships.There may be a tension here between what could be seen as a male world of ideas and achievement and a female world of physicality and continuity.Pelagia's physicality goes unfulfilled largely due to a war which could be seen as the embodiment of male preoccupation with attainment . Corelli's misunderstanding which compounds the situation is so blind it has driven some readers to fury and yet it makes psychological sense if we consider the incompatibility of their needs. I felt that that the ending held its own sort of truth, it reminded me of Romeo and Juliet, I wanted to shake them too.

Rating:
Summary: What an inadequate ending to an otherwise great book
Review: It is a surprise that on an island where there are no secrets, somebody's marital status would be a secret. Bernieres spins a good story, but he shows anxiety and rushes to end the book. It seems the story telling is so wild and enjoyable, all of a sudden it is time to end it and a few hasty, hurried chapters and a most improbable ending is all the author can do. It is abrupt and most disappointing. I strongly recommend The War of Don Emmanuels Nether Parts - a riot of a book but with an equally unsatisfying and inexplicable ending.

Rating:
Summary: Inspirational
Review: Is it hackneyed to say a book changed your life? This book changed my expectation of modern literature. The author's every word is a brush stroke that paints a vivid picture of the life and growth of the characters. I wept from from the pain and the beauty I found within this book. I believe the next book will be the story of Drosoula, I look forward to it with relish.

Rating:
Summary: Best book I read since Zorba
Review: It is one of thoes books you will never forget. loved every page of it. Not since Zorba and Palace Walk, have I been so touched and impressed by a book. It should be considered for the Nobel Prize.