A Review of ‘Captain Corelli’s Mandolin’ by Louis de Bernières
Whenever we talk about war, we talk about glory and defeat of war, its economics and its motivations. Rarely do we pause for a moment and talk about the human cost of the war which is entirely different from the statistics we hear about in war. The statistics of war is the count of graves dug, the count of men lost behind enemy lines and the count of men missing in action. The human cost of war is the trauma that we leave families with after war, the orphaned children, the soldiers who forever relive the same experiences again and again as long as they are alive, the art and culture and centuries of human progress obliterated with the push of a single button.
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin is a en epic saga set during the second world war in the Greek Island of Cephalonia and centre’s around the lives of Captain Antonio Corelli of the 33rd Infantry Division Acqui, who fashions himself more as a musician than as a soldier, and Pelagia a fiercely independent Greek woman who falls in love with the Antonio. Their love story is the usual mix of boy meets girl, girl hates boy, but boy is adorable so eventually she falls for him. By no means do I intend to say that the love story in this book is bad. As a matter of fact, I really found the blossoming of love between them handled very maturely. Since we have addressed the elephant in the room, now lets move on to other things that really standout in this tale and make it a unique experience to read.
Firstly, the character of Captain Corelli is introduced after nearly a 150 pages. This really surprised me because I was waiting eagerly to meet the man on whose mandolin’s name this book was written.
Talking about the mandolin, I think it represents a side to this soldier which is untainted by the grim and squalor of the world war waging around him. As he keeps telling a lot of times to a lot of characters in the story, he is a musician at heart and an accidental soldier who rose up to the occasion and took arms. Also, it is mentioned early on in the book, that the Captain would never let any harm fall unto his mandolin but would often forget about his weapons and even misplace at times.
We see war from both sides of the battlefield and we see that on both sides men have had gruesome deaths and even more gruesome experiences if they did not die. You are left to wonder if there is any glory in war at all for the foot soldier, the man who actually holds the rifle and guns down fellow men will bask in the victory. He is cursed to only carry the scars and his medals to the grave. There will be no monuments or avenues with his name, no bards shall write songs in his praise. Only the earth shall embrace this unnamed soldier as he sleeps in his modest grave if he has the privilege having one.
I will end this tirade with one sequence that was especially moving. After a particularly devastating earthquake that decimated the island of Cephalonia a priest rushes out of his parish and yells at the heavens. He cries out asking god if his people had not suffered enough and why god continues to taunt them.
As I write this down, there is a terrible second wave of Covid19 in India, a seemingly never ending pandemic and a ghastly clash between Israel and Palestine. Whenever these carnages end, if they end that is, millions of people would have turned into a mere statistic.
