Captain Corelli's Mandolin
Louis de Bernières · 1994
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 case against
Greek veterans had reason to object: de Bernières paints the communist partisans as bandits and sadists, a portrait that provoked real protest on Kefalonia, and it warps the book's last act. The final contrivance is worse, an ending steered by coincidence rather than earned by anything that came before. The whimsy and the atrocities never agree on a tone.
Romance · the Pro canon
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
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