It Sings: Corelli's Mandolin

I took Louis de Bernieres Correli's Mandolin out of the library last year. It was like having a box of macarons and not wanting to finish eating them because then they'd be all gone. I read short sections of it each night, hearing the story in my head, seeing the Greek island, long before Captain Correlli and his company occupy it. I decided it was a book to own and reread all that I read before and still moved through the book slowly, savoring it and underlining my own copy again and again.

It is so much better than the movie and I actually liked the movie, surprisingly only the second Nicholas Cage movie I can endorse, but that was early in his career, as was Moonstruck. I found it very difficult to isolate the factors that appeal to me and then I read about deBernieres on Wiki and discovered what an influence Garcia Marquez was in his writing. Duh, the story is loaded with South American style magical realism. He writes of a community over long periods of time, where history is myth and contemporary citizens larger than myth. He is a storyteller and the characters are unforgettable.

de Bernieres comes into his story most often through the voice of the doctor who is trying to write a history of Cephallonia, its centuries of occupiers and its links to Greco-Roman cultural heritage. The villagers are wonderful, if a bit stereotypical, at least/most human ... the drunken priest, the widowed mother of Pelagia's fiance Mandras, the gentle giant, the old men in the cafe. The reader loves them for their oddities, their humanity.

Unlike Play It As It Lays and Things Fall Apart, this is a story of triumph. Where the plot weakens is towards the end where the author depicts a more contemporary Greece where the population is skewed towards the vulgarity of ignorant but rich tourists. The ending in the movie is a bit more believable than Corelli returning to Pelagia when they are in their late 60s or early 70s, not that the reader does not believe their love can quickly rekindle, but that he was able to return to the island often not noticed by the villagers or that she could not figure out it was him sending her unsigned postcards from around the world for decades. It is not likely that these two could still hop on a motor scooter and find the old shepherd's abandoned hut where they trysted in their youth, especially since everything else on the island was pretty much destroyed in the earthquake of 1953.