Corelli's Mandolin

Wuthering Bites Book Club Review at a Glance

What We Said

This book is a somewhat difficult to review because I thought it mostly excellent, but in my opinion (and most of our bookclub) the ending was a disappointment. In fact, to some it was very upsetting! I think it speaks volumes that our book club was so passionately opposed to the ending - we must have cared about this book and its characters a great deal to invoke such strong feelings. Should you disregard this book because it is not perfect in our opinion? I don't think so. The majority of the book is so good. It is both a love story and historical novel filled with vibrant characters and great writing. I laughed out loud many times while reading this book. Our discussion revolved mainly around the ending and how we would have written it differently. Perhaps reading the book a second time is in order, and then the ending will not seem as tragic.
-Sue

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Louis de Bernieres was born in 1954. After four disastrous months in the British army, he left for a village in Columbia, where he worked as a teacher in the morning and a cowboy in the afternoon. He returned to England, where he was employed as a mechanic, a landscape gardener, and a groundsman at a mental hospital. He has published a trilogy of tragicomic novels, the last being The Troublesom Offspring of Cardinal Guzman.

• Red Dog
• Corelli's Mandolin
• The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts
• Senor Vivo and the Coca Lord
• The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman

From the Publisher

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.

Reading Group Guide

The questions and discussion topics are intended to enhance your group's reading of Louis de Bernières's Corelli's Mandolin. We hope they will give you a number of angles from which to look at this rich and exciting novel.

• The defeat of the Italian army at the hands of the Allied forces brings new traumas and dilemmas for Pelagia and Corelli, as the Germans rout their erstwhile Italian allies with a series of hair-raising murders and atrocities, and, after the armistice, Greece herself is plunged into a brutal civil war between Communist and royalist forces. Pelagia's optimism and love of life is challenged as she suffers dreadful losses, but her courage and tenacity sustain her, and finally her lifelong search for love does not go unrewarded.
• 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?
• Why do you think de Bernières 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?
• 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?
• 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"?
• 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 the sun, 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?
• "Honour and common sense; in the light of the other, both of them are ridiculous" [p. 320]. What does de Bernières 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?
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?
• 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?
• During World War II, atrocities and betrayals were committed on an unprecedented scale. De Bernières 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 Günter Weber's traumatic decision to obey Hitler's order for the massacre of Italian soldiers? Why is Günter characterized as a "good Nazi"? Is this appellation entirely ironic?
• Do you find de Bernières'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"?
• 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 Bernières 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 Bernières 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 Bernières? By Iannis? By Pelagia?
• 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?
• 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 Bernières 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?
• 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?
• 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 Bernières convey through these parallels?
• De Bernières chooses his characters' names with care. What significance can you ascribe to particular names, such as Pelagia, Mandras, Hector, Corelli, Weber?
• Why do you think de Bernières 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 Bernières's moral scheme?

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Inspired by this excellent novel, we've come up with a few Greek recipes to share. More menus and recipes

Sausage-Potato Lasagna - an alternative to traditional lasagna with Greek spices
Greek Egg and Lemon Soup - Greek comfort food