Captain Corelli's Mandolin

The story begins with Dr. Iannis, a multilingual doctor with an established practice on the Greek island of Cephalonia. Iannis lives with his daughter Pelagia; Pelagia's mother died of tuberculosis. Pelagia, now a young woman, is headstrong and intelligent, and has learned about medicine by observing her father.

Pelagia meets a young fisherman named Mandras, and they become engaged. War has been declared, and Mandras decides to go fight at the front. Pelagia's letters to him go unanswered.

Meanwhile, Carlo Guercio fights among the Italian forces that invade Albania, and sees his beloved friend, Francesco, whom he is in love with, shot by the Greek army during the Greco-Italian War.

In 1941, Italian and German soldiers are posted to Cephalonia, where they are ostracized by the locals. Pelagia is determined to hate them, especially when a jovial young captain by the name of Antonio Corelli is domiciled with her. Mandras comes home from the war, injured and filthy, and as Pelagia nurses him she realizes she no longer loves him.

After Mussolini loses power, Italy joins forces with the Allies. The Italians who occupy Greece thus are freed from their duties. After defeating the Italian division, the German soldiers on Cephalonia turn on them, and order a massive execution. Corelli's life is saved by Carlo Guercio, who shields him with his body when they face execution by firing squad. Guercio dies, and the wounded Corelli is aided by a Greek back to Pelagia's house. Corelli has to stay hidden from the Germans, whose orders are to kill any surviving Italians.

As soon as he is well enough, Corelli escapes to Italy, promising Pelagia that he will return as soon as the war ends and then they will be married. Corelli leaves Antonia, his mandolin, with Pelagia for safekeeping.

The Germans become brutal, and Dr Iannis is sent to a camp. Mandras returns, indoctrinated with Communist ideologies and having learned to read. He has read Pelagia's letters and knows that she does not love him, so he tries to rape her. Ashamed, he later commits suicide.

Some time after, a baby girl is left on Pelagia's doorstep, whom Pelagia adopts. Dr Iannis comes home, traumatised. Life goes on in Cephalonia, though interrupted by the 1953 Ionian earthquake, in which Iannis dies.

Corelli does not return, though Pelagia is convinced she sees his ghost. The baby girl, whom Pelagia has named Antonia, grows up and marries.

Many years later, an old man visits Pelagia. It is Antonio Corelli, now a famous mandolin player. He explains that he did not visit before because, having seen her with baby Antonia on her doorstep and believing her to be married, he was bitter. The novel ends on a happy note.

Near the end of the novel, in Chapter 62, Pelagia receives a photograph from Günter Weber and written on the back is a passage in German from Goethe's Faust, "Gretchen am Spinnrad," which is also a popular German Lied, set to music by Schubert. It reads:

Meine Ruh ist hin,
Mein Herz ist schwer,
Ich finde sie nimmer
und nimmermehr.

Which translates as:

My peace is gone,
My heart is sore [lit. "heavy"],
I will find it never
and nevermore.

Bernières has denied that the character of Corelli is based on Amos Pampaloni who was then an Italian artillery captain in Cephalonia, despite the many similarities in their stories. Pampaloni survived execution, joined the Greek People's Liberation Army, the Partisans in the Greek civil war, and fought with them in Epirus for fourteen months. Pampaloni was interviewed by The Guardian newspaper in 2000[4] and expressed the view that the novel misrepresented the Greek partisan movement.

The novel also shows some similarities to Bandiera bianca a Cefalonia, a novel by Marcello Venturi published in 1963, translated in English as The White Flag (1969).

The Orlando Sentinel called Corelli's Mandolin a "radically traditionalist" novel, "a good nourishing tale full of true things, historical and psychological, spiced with opinion and contrariness, with not one dollop of regard for artistic fashion."[5]

The Cleveland Plain Dealer praised the multiple emotional levels of the novel, remarking, "Like Puccini, de Bernières can evoke golden narrative, full of both pain and gladness."[6]

Gene Hyde wrote, "To defy Sisyphus and rebel against the absurd, especially in the face of war, is an excruciatingly difficult and noble task. The beauty of Bernières' unique and deeply moving novel is his insistence that our hope lies in these seemingly quixotic impulses."[7]

1995 – Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book

2004 – 19th place on The Big Read

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