Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2493526 in Books
• Published on: 1995-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 437 pages

Customer Reviews

Wonderful book to read.
I read de Berniers' Captain Corelli's Mandolin over the weekend and felt the same way I feel when I read books by Marquez. As with Marquez it takes awhile before the distractions in my head recede to the point where I can appreciate the complex and intricate rhythm of the words and then I am hooked. The text is extraordinarily dense and rich with meaning about life and love and packed with historical information.

The ending was a disappointment, or more precisely, the approach to the ending was a disappointment.

Well written but totally inaccurate historically
The fiction part of this novel is well written and entertaining. The history part of it is inaccurate and fully distorted by the personal views of the writer. He is assuming right and wrong based on his political philosophy. The explanation he gives on the author's note shows how partial he is. His historical knowledge is as accurate as saying that Britain is still an empire. He should stick to purely fictional novels.

superb book, but great shame about the rotten ending
what spoils this book for me is the contrived and veryunconvincing ending. it strikes me that once again we have an author who has not had the strength of nerve to follow the internal logic of the book to the very end. another classic example of this syndrome is miss smilla's feeling for snow, which casts an almost magical spell over the reader for the first two thirds and then falls away sharply as it becomes clear that the author doesn't know how to end the book. for me, one of the main themes -- if the not the most important theme -- running through captain corelli's mandolin is the implicit message that you have to make the most of what you have today, because life is so arbitrary that disaster can strike any time, and usually does, especially in wartime. the author just about builds up enough sympathy for corelli to allow us to forgive him for the execution scene. for me, the book should have ended here, or once peace had broken out. of course we want to know what happened to corelli, but life isn't that neat, it's very chaotic, and had de bernieres followed the logic he created for the book -- the machinery which powers the plot along -- we would have been left wondering desperately what did happen to the (somewhat) one-dimensional but charming italian. to bring it all to neat end many years later, with every loose end tied up, just seems to be a cheap way out. i feel somewhat guilty carping on like this about what is in many ways an enchanting book, but i was deeply disappointed by the denouement. the bbc recently showed a documentary about de bernieres returning to cephallonia which featuerd various english celebrities talking about the book. theatre director richard eyre said he had given out over 100 copies to friends and acquantainces as a kind of test -- "I could not love anyone who did not love this book," he explained. this is a test i have used myself, but with another book, perhaps the greatest novel ever written -- "the master and margarita" by mikhail bulgakov. the huge unbridgeable chasm between the two books is that bulgakov sticks to his own rules to the very end and thereby produces something magical rather than something which is merely very good.