Captain Corelli's Mandolin: Louis De Bernieres

Product Information

Soon, the Italians decide to house officers with local Greeks. Dr. Iannis strikes a deal with a quartermaster to house an officer in exchange for medical supplies, so Corelli arrives that evening. Dr. Iannis and Pelagia do everything in their power to make Corelli feel horrible about occupying Greece, including telling him that Psipsina is a "Greek cat." When Psipsina bites Corelli, he feels very foolish. The following morning, Carlo meets the Greek strongman Velisarios and Corelli strikes up a friendship with Lemoni. Mandras calls later to tell Pelagia he's joining the partisans. He insults her and the waistcoat she made him, but promises he loves her. Corelli notices the coat later and offers to buy it, insisting it's magnificent. DVD. Condition: Very Good. 2001 DVD Very Good Offered by the UK charity Langdon - working to support young men and women with disabilities.

Captain Corelli's Mandolin": (Piano Solo) (Faber Edition): Music Inspired by the Novels of Louis de Bernieres But of all de Bernières’s disparaging claims about the Cephalonian resistance, perhaps the most deeply resented by the island’s veterans is his insistence that the movement refused to come to the aid of the Italians when they turned on their former German allies at such terrible cost in the autumn of 1943. It is “certain”, the British soldier-turned-author declares in the novel, that the “communist andartes of ELAS took no part, seeing no reason to shake themselves out of their parasitic lethargy”. Later, he even has the heroine, Pelagia, hearing that the partisans have been “killing off” Italians who came to fight alongside them against the Germans. I saw this movie first years ago and decided to read the book for clarity on Carlos' role in the story which is quite vague in the movie. Louis de Bernieres' Captain Corelli's Mandolin is a historical fiction that encompasses symbolism, character development and evolving relationships with a look at WWII that is frequently overlooked, the disrupted but mundane lives of those touched by the war in less horrific ways than concentration camps and mass executions. An idyllic island home, a questioned saint and war touched lives that intermingle in touching relationships.Corelli begins to play mandolin for Pelagia and the two talk about their dreams for life after the war. Corelli wants to be a musician and for the first time, Pelagia voices her desire to be a doctor. Though Pelagia and Dr. Iannis continue to torment Corelli, Pelagia finds herself falling for him. She stares at him, touches him without thinking, and becomes gradually less angry with him. Dr. Iannis notices their budding romance and wonders what to do. A pamphlet appears on Cephalonia one day that makes fun of Mussolini and all the ways in which he's hypocritical and absurd. Corelli isn't charmed, though Carlo and Dr. Iannis are. Pelagia suggests that given the syntax, the pamphlet could've been written by conspiring Greeks and Italians, but when she sees her father and Carlo's reaction to this, she thinks they're stupid. A few days later, Corelli wakes up with a hangover, argues with Pelagia about his role in the war, and begins to compose "Pelagia's March." I had high hopes going into this one and I’m sad to say that it left me a little disappointed. de Bernieres’ writing style is excellent and the actual book felt almost poetic because of the way in which it was written. The problem is that it just dragged on and on, and while the characters were realistic and fully fleshed out, I just didn’t relate to them.

I liked how little I knew about this book before I read it, so I won't say too much in the way of plot. The characters are delightful and complicated, and the glimpses you get of the non-main characters are intoxicating. De Bernieres provides priceless description and personification of non-humans, including various animal species, musical instruments, and countries. The book comments on politics in a thoughtful way, but doesn't oversimplify or beat you over the head with anything. The Greek doctor Dr. Iannis attempts to write an impartial history of his island, Cephalonia. However, he finds he cannot do so without getting angry about the numerous Greek conquests, so he amends his title to read "A Personal History of Cephalonia." In the village, his daughter Pelagia falls in love with a young fisherman named Mandras. They get engaged in August on the feast day of St. Gerasimos, but Pelagia is unhappy about it. Dr. Iannis refuses to provide a dowry, suggests Mandras is too uneducated to appreciate Pelagia, and counsels that they should wait to get married until after the war. Dr. Iannis spends most of his time at the kapheneia with his friends Stamatis and Kokolios, who are royalist and communist respectively. Though they used to fight about politics, as the war moves towards Greece, the three band together for the sake of their country. Dr. Iannis also adopts a pine marten that the child Lemoni names Psipsina. The book's ebullient varieties of speech and narrative make it tempting to call it a "polyphonic novel". The term was invented by the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin in the 1920s to describe Dostoevsky's fiction. Bakhtin praised Dostoevsky for rendering "a plurality of unmerged voices and consciousnesses". He had in mind the novelist's willingness to allow his characters' words and attitudes to predominate over any authorial insights. (Would Captain Corelli's Mandolin always qualify by this test? De Bernières's novel includes passages where a narrator tells us things -such as future events - that none of his characters can know.) Bakhtin initially claimed that Dostoevsky had originated "a fundamentally new novelistic genre", before later deciding that he had instead perfected what had always been a subversive inclination of most interesting fiction.Different voices find many forms. There are letters; there are political diatribes; there are speeches and sermons. Equally, the chapters of third-person narrative reflect many different viewpoints. Most often we see events through the eyes of Iannis, or Pelagia, or Corelli, but free indirect style gives us the thoughts of many others, from Mina, the mad girl who is to be "cured" by Saint Gerasimos, to Lieutenant Weber, the "good Nazi", confused by the habits of his Italian allies. The collection of narratives is made to enact an understanding of human variety.

Early one morning, Alekos the goatherd notices an angel falling from the sky. Alekos nurses the injured angel for two days before leading it to Dr. Iannis's house. Dr. Iannis discovers that the angel is actually a British spy, Bunnios, who speaks ancient Greek.

Dr. Iannis counsels Pelagia and Corelli in turn. He tells Pelagia to wait to marry Corelli until after the war, as that's the only way she'll know if their love is genuine. He tells Corelli that Pelagia has a dark and mysterious other side, as all Greeks do, and cautions him against making plans. EDIT: changed because my friends thought my analysis was a bit pretentious. Left it below for reference. Basically, Greek woman sleeps with Italian officer in the time of fascism. Goes about as well as you would expect. From the islanders’ point of view, no charge could be more wounding. The Italian-German confrontation and subsequent massacres were a defining moment of modern Cephalonian history. The only resistance force on the island was ELAS and its political wing, EAM, though neither organisation was exclusively, or even predominantly, communist. Both Greeks and Italian survivors testify that not only did the resistance give practical and armed support to the Italian troops, but 15 andartes lost their lives in the fighting. Far from killing Italians who escaped the German slaughter, the resistance - including the parents of Dionisis Georgatos, Cephalonia’s present-day governor - hid them and helped spirit them off the island. I should probably mention that I read this entirely based on http://www.thisonenext.com, and I am quite impressed. This book is absolutely me. admittedly, i found some of the post-war events in the novel a little tiresome. of course i enjoyed du beniere's prose still, but the climax for me remains at the 2/3rds mark, everything after was a drawn-out conclusion.