Captain Corelli's Mandolin: Louis De Bernieres

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Even Podimatas’s record of persecution fails to match the experience of Vangelis Neochorotis, a 91-year-old Cephalonian veteran of both the resistance and the Greek-Italian war of 1940-1941, who spent 21 years in prison and whose brother was executed during the civil war. Both he and his brother, like thousands of others, refused an offer of release if they signed a statement renouncing communism. Sitting in the garden of the house in Paliki he has lived in since the 30s with his wife Amalia - herself a former EAM member who was tortured after the war - Neochorotis gives his view of the Corelli story: “De Bernières’s book is an insult to the whole Greek people. But I believe it is also part of a global drive to rewrite history, to reverse historical facts, to convince people that political and social change is a dead end and that if you struggle for a better world, it only leads to bloodshed, suffering and failure.” 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.

Dr. Iannis arranges for Lemoni to take his household to gather snails, as there's little else to eat. Corelli and Pelagia become separated from Dr. Iannis and Lemoni, and they admit that they love each other. Corelli struggles with the fact that the war that brought them together is ruining Greece, which makes Pelagia angry. She tries to prepare the snails but is interrupted when Lemoni visits and Corelli realizes she found a mine. Though the mine is old, Corelli and Carlo decide to blow it up for safety. The entire village and the Italian troops watch. It kills an engineer and covers everyone in sand. Corelli and Pelagia spend as much time as they can kissing, talking about the future, and riding a motorcycle around the island.Forgotten the title or the author of a book? Our BookSleuth is specially designed for you. Visit BookSleuth 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. It is a novel not just of different narrative voices and points of view, but also of different languages. It uses fragments of Italian, French, German (and transliterated Greek), but mostly it has to represent the different languages, and the mutual misunderstandings, of the characters in a language that none of them are using: English. (Though if Iannis and his daughter were not fluent in Italian, a language for which the doctor has always had an inflated regard, and therefore able to have all their disputes with Corelli, the novel would not have been possible.) Incomprehension is invariably comical. An Eton-educated British agent is introduced to Iannis and made to speak a Chaucerian English that is the novel's equivalent of the classical Greek he employs. "Sire, of youre gentillesse, by the leve of yow wol I speke in pryvetee of certeyn thyng," is his opening gambit. "What?" replies the bewildered doctor, speaking in a fluent, colloquial English which is the novel's equivalent of modern Greek. When he and the Englishman agree to converse in English, Iannis's speech becomes broken and ungrammatical: "You accent terrible-terrible. Not to talk, understand?"

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. 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.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.

By the second chapter, I had the distinct impressions that this was one of those gems of a book that should not ever, ever, ever be made into a movie, ever. For perspective, I feel this way about Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and do not feel it about Lord of the Rings. The problem with these "feelings" is that I won't ever be able to investigate them, because if I read a book like this I will categorically refuse to see the movie for fear of ruining the book, and if I see the movie first, I probably won't ever know. Dionisis Georgatos - the elected governor of Cephalonia who negotiated carefully-framed terms for the Corelli film to be made on the island - dismisses de Bernières’s book as “reactionary and wrong”. Nobody, he says, wants to benefit from the film “if it distorts our history - we had many deaths, houses were burned, people hanged in the streets. It is very sensitive. De Bernières clearly used British sources from that time and, of course, they had the role of invaders.” Gerasimos Artelanis, mayor of Sami and, like Georgatos, a member of Greece’s ruling socialist party, Pasok, has threatened to take the film-makers to the International Court of Justice if they include de Bernières’s most controversial claims, thus breaking an undertaking not to inflame political and national sensitivities. Makis Faraklos, now the 76-year-old president of the resistance veterans’ association in the Cephalonian town of Lixouri, remembers witnessing the fate of some of those whom de Bernières insists spent the German occupation doing nothing. “On June 5, 1944, the Germans hanged five resistance members in the main square because the andartes had killed a collaborator. They forced everyone they found on the streets to go there and set up four machine guns around us. One of the five, Dionisis Ratsiatos, was my teacher - I loved that man. There was a father and son, Gavrilis and Vasilis Rallatos, and the father was forced to watch his son hanged twice, because the rope broke the first time they strung him up. They hanged them from two trees. The youngest to die that day was Spiros Analitis, in his early 20s. The German commander announced through an interpreter that he would be freed if he gave information about the resistance. Analitis didn’t reply, but called to the crowd, ‘You, tyranny-fighting youth, will avenge our deaths.’ “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.

Until the 70s, it was still a crime in Greece to have fought against the Nazis in the main wartime resistance movement, while Nazi collaborators received pensions. The role of the ELAS “andartes”, or guerillas, in the liberation was formally recognised by the state only under Andreas Papandreou in the 80s. But, in case any reader might have mistaken his own view, de Bernières included an author’s note in earlier editions of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin to berate “disconnected intellectuals” for regarding the Greek communists as “romantic heroes”, adding, “when they were not totally useless, perfidious and parasitic, they were unspeakably barbaric”.

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. 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. 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.