Summary | Author | Reviews | Discussion Questions


Corelli's Mandolin
Louis de Berniers, 1994
448 pp.

In Brief
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. (From the publisher)

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About the Author

• Birth—December 8, 1954
• Where—London
• Education—Bradfield College; Victoria University of
   Manchester; University of London
• Awards—Commonwealth Writers Prize, 1994.
• Currently—London


Louis de Bernieres' novels include The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts (Commonwealth Writers Prize, Best First Book Eurasia Region, 1991), Senor Vivo and the Coca Lord (Commonwealth Writers Prize, Best Book Eurasia Region, 1992), and The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman. The author, who lives in London, was selected as one of the twenty Best of Young British Novelists 1993.

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Critics Say. . .
Heartbreaking, beautiful and deeply moving--if not always entirely believable--de Bernieres's extraordinary novel is based on a historic episode: the Nazis' occupation of the sleepy Greek island of Cephallonia and their slaughter of thousands of occupying Italian troops who turned against fascism in solidarity with the native Greeks. The novel's central love story, pairing willful Greek beauty Pelagia and jesting Italian captain Antonio Corelli, a mandolin player, reluctant soldier and despiser of Mussolini, veers toward sentimentality until their idyll is shattered by the German invasion. Pelagia's immature fiance, Greek fisherman Mandras, becomes a fanatical Communist, commits atrocities and later returns from battle to beat Pelagia, who shoots him. By this time, Corelli--saved from a Nazi firing squad by his driver, Carlo, a closet homosexual who unrequitedly loves him--has left to fight the Germans. Pelagia narrowly survives, but her father, an erudite widowed doctor, is killed by Greek Communists. De Bernieres ( The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts ) follows the fortunes of his resilient heroine and the war orphan she adopts through 1933, when we learn that Corelli, presumed dead, has absented himself for decades due to a calamitous misunderstanding. Swinging between antic ribaldry and criminal horror, between corrosive satire and infinite sorrow, this soaring novel glows with a wise humanity that is rare in contemporary fiction. ( Sept. )
This dark yet dazzling tour de force invigorates the genre of antiwar comedies in the style of Hasek, Heller and Vonnegut. Bernieres sweeps across a 50 year history of a glorious Greek Island at peace and at war and simultaneously homes in on its panoply of major and minor characters and the Italians forced by Mussolini to invade them. The fusion of Greek and Christian mythologies in Cephalonia makes for rollicking scenes such as the Feast of St. Gerasimos, with its miracle cures and drunken stupors. The barbaric, paranoid absurdity of Mussolini and his ill-prepared, ill-led and unwilling army makes both for high comedy and blood curdling scenes of starvation, misery and death. The humanizing role of the arts, musical and medical, informs it all. Because Berniers's farce and fury erupt through a witty word play carefully tone shifts, listening to this novel is, in some ways, even better than reading it. Lang fearlessly carries listeners through swiftly changing currents of tenderness and horror, kindness and cruelty. With his fine array of Greek, Italian and British accents, he masterfully reveals the soaring emotional range across and within characters. Even the lengthy tirades of fascist dictators and communist dogmatists are rendered with passionate, painful and refreshing irony. Based on the 1994 Pantheon hardcover. (Jan.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
Publishers Weekly


Set on the Greek island of Cephallonia, this splendid novel spans five decades beginning in the late 1930s just before the Axis forces occupy the island. Using myriad voices to chronicle the horrors of combat and the boredom of occupation, it is by turns funny, sad, and cruel. Corelli is an Italian army captain, a member of the first extraneous forces to occupy Cephallonia, and the lover of Pelagia Iannis. It is through Pelagia's voice that much of the story is revealed, but the chorus includes her father, various Greek villagers, Italian and Greek soldiers, and a goatherd. Besides showing considerable knowledge of historical events and of stringed instruments, the author reveals a keen ability to switch perspectives from young to old, monarchist to Communist, combat soldier to passive peasant, male to female. It doesn't matter that the plot becomes a bit sappy in the last 20 pages because most readers will have already guessed the conclusion and are reveling in the glitter of all that precedes it.
Library Journal


A soft-spoken, unenergetic narrative of grief, anger and forgiveness. Megan Van Dorn, nearing her 50s, has found fulfillment in late motherhood; life in her Midwestern suburb is good, and she even seems to enjoy spending hours in an ergonomic chair in an accounting office. Then tragedy strikes: Her bright, pleasant son is killed in an automobile accident. The offending driver is Megan's childhood friend Cindy Ann Kreisler, who, it seems, has a drinking problem but who manages to avoid a Breathalyzer test until a couple of hours after the crash, and even then "her blood alcohol level . . . was barely within Wisconsin's legal limit." In depicting all this, novelist and memoirist Ansay (Limbo, 2001, etc.) is matter-of-fact, at a seeming remove from her characters. When Cindy Ann is acquitted with a slap-on-the-wrist punishment, Megan finds herself "terrible in my anger: strong, and fierce, and righteous. I could have led an army"; yet the reader doesn't ever feel much of this anger, for Megan's narration is flat and without affect, and her discovery of "the sheer cathartic power of . . . rage" is evidenced mostly by the fact that she sets a lawyer loose on Cindy Ann while she and her near-perfect husband, Rex, fulfill his
Kirkus Review

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Discussion Questions

1. What understanding does Pelagia have of love as a young girl? How do her ideas come to change during the course of the novel? What is Carlo Guercio's definition of love? How does it guide his actions throughout the story? What is the difference between the love he feels for Francisco and that which he feels for Corelli? How might the other characters define love? Which of them lives up to his or her conception of it?

2. Why do you think de Bernieres chose to make his romantic hero a musician? Why is music, of all the arts, a potential healer of international folly and strife? What significance does Corelli's composition "Pelagia's March" carry within the narrative?

3. After Mandras tries to rape Pelagia, he is very decisively rejected not only by Pelagia but by his own mother. Does Drosoula's rejection of her son strike you as reasonable or heartless? As natural or unnatural? Was Mandras irredeemably lost at this point, or might he perhaps have been saved?

4. What is the role of the Church in Cephallonian life? What does pragmatic toleration of the drunken Arsenios say about the islanders' culture, their character, and their religion? How does Arsenios repay their tolerance? Does the palpable presence of the ancient deities alongside the Orthodox ceremonial enrich the Greeks' faith or dilute it? What importance does the cult of Saint Gerasimos have for the islanders? What interpretation do individual characters such as Dr. Iannis and Pelagia give to the saint's miraculous "cures"?

5. Dr. Iannis writes that the island of Cephallonia is "so immense in antiquity that the very rocks themselves exhale nostalgia and the red earth lies stupefied not only by thesun, but by the impossible weight of memory" [p. 5]. How does their awareness of the island's history and prehistory color the way the Cephallonians see themselves? Does it help them to come to terms with their traditional roles in life? What attitude does it give them toward their recent conquerors?

6. "Honour and common sense; in the light of the other, both of them are ridiculous" [p. 320]. What does de Bernieres mean by this? How do the novel's events confirm or illustrate this statement? Do you find that in certain of the novel's characters these two qualities are not, in fact, mutually exclusive?

7. Carlo Guercio memorably describes the war as "frivolous" [p. 116]. What does he mean by this? How is the quality of frivolity exemplified in the actions of the military leaders and those who follow them? Do you find the adjective an appropriate one for the war described in these pages?

8. What message does this book deliver on the nature of political ideology and political passion? What is the role of political ideology in the lives of Mandras, Kokolias, Stamatis, Hector, Weber, Alexi? How do their actions support or refute their stated political creeds? What political or antipolitical ideals inspire the novel's most noble characters, Carlo and Dr. Iannis?

9. During World War II, atrocities and betrayals were committed on an unprecedented scale. De Bernieres explores the psychology of those who committed those atrocities through several of his characters. Mandras's justification that "it was Hector who was the executioner and he was only the hand" [p. 193] was a common one among Nazi, Fascist, and Communist executioners. How does this justification differ from Gunter Weber's traumatic decision to obey Hitler's order for the massacre of Italian soldiers? Why is Gunter characterized as a "good Nazi"? Is this appellation entirely ironic?

10. Do you find de Bernieres's use of national stereotypes to be effective within his fictional scheme? To what degree can Dr. Iannis be seen as the personification of Greece, Corelli as the spirit of Italy? Do they succeed as three-dimensional characters as well? Do Pelagia's and Corelli's guilt-induced decisions to refute their own nationalities make them any the less "Greek" or "Italian"?

11. Dr. Iannis finds that in writing his history, "objectivity seemed to be quite unattainable" [p. 4]. Carlo says that history tends to be "the propaganda of the victors" when it should consist "only of the anecdotes of the little people who are caught up in it" [p. 33]. Does de Bernieres confront these problems in the way he writes his own historical novel? What narrative techniques does he employ in telling his story? In his Author's Note, de Bernieres describes history as "hearsay tempered with myth and hazy memory" [p. 436], yet he himself has in fact remained very faithful to the historical facts as we know them. Why, then, does he offer this apology? Are myth and history significantly differentiated by de Bernieres? By Iannis? By Pelagia?

12. Did Pelagia believe that Corelli died during the war? If not, why does she not leave Cephallonia and try to find him? Does her remaining at home denote passivity or ambivalence about their relationship? What about Pelagia's initial rage at Corelli when they meet again--do you feel that her anger is excessive, or that possibly she is not angry enough?

13. In Pelagia's youth no woman was allowed to enter a kapheneia; thirty years later, the elderly Drosoula runs her own taverna and young Antonia is a successful businesswoman. Changes in social mores might not have manifested themselves as dramatically on Cephallonia during the postwar years as they did in more cosmopolitan areas, but they were in fact radical and profound. How does everyday life on Cephallonia reflect these changes? What role, if any, did the 1953 earthquake play in changing the island, and in the shift in generations? Does de Bernieres imply that the changes are for the better, or for the worse? Or, perhaps, that in essence life has not changed very much at all?

14. Does the happy ending conform with the plot and spirit of the entire novel, or does it represent a shift into a more fantastic, less realistic mode? Do you find it to be an appropriate or an inappropriate conclusion to Pelagia's and Corelli's story?

15. In what way are the novel's characters directly or indirectly compared with figures from Greek mythology? Among the Cephallonians, what modern manifestations do we find of Apollo, Aphrodite, Penelope, Odysseus, Hercules, and other mythological figures? What message about time and change does de Bernieres convey through these parallels?

16. De Bernieres chooses his characters' names with care. What significance can you ascribe to particular names, such as Pelagia, Mandras, Hector, Corelli, Weber?

17. Why do you think de Bernieres has chosen the Humbert Wolfe poem "The Soldier" to launch his narrative? Which themes in the poem are explored in the novel itself? Perhaps the most famous war poem in the English language, by Rupert Brooke, is also called "The Soldier." How does Wolfe's poem comment upon Brooke's? How might the various soldiers in Corelli's Mandolin respond to the assertions made by both poets? Is the kind of idealism glorified by Brooke finally meaningless, as many of his contemporaries, physically and emotionally crushed by World War I, came to find it? Or is it in fact a valuable characteristic, at least within de Bernieres's moral scheme?