Captain Corelli's Mandolin
A love story set on a Greek island during WWII that asks the hardest question: what does love owe to history, to duty, to survival? Pelagia and Corelli are beautifully drawn; the novel around them is richly comic and then catastrophically sad. The mandolin music runs through it like a leitmotif for joy in the face of annihilation.
The book named after Captain Corelli barely features him at all early on: “he doesn't make a meaningful appearance in the first 100 pages,” one reader points out. Many describe a hard quality split once the story moves past that slow opening, with one writing flatly, “the second half of the book is drek.” A late misunderstanding between the two leads strikes several as contrived, with one calling it “one of the most contrived plot devices of all time” given how carefully those characters were built up earlier. The compressed, fast-forwarded final chapters, jamming several decades into far fewer pages than the war years get, read as rushed and tonally jarring against everything before them. A critic notes that “excerpts from Dr. Iannis's historical writings sometimes slow the pace” even in the stronger stretches.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
