Corelli's Mandolin

January 1, 2001
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.

August 28, 1995
De Bernieres mixes history and fantasy in this love story set on an idyllic Greek island torn apart by Nazi occupation.

Starred review from August 29, 1994
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.