Makis Faraklos, now the 76-year-old president of the resistance veterans’ association in the Cephalonian town of Lixouri, remembers witnessing the fate of some of those whom de Bernières insists spent the German occupation doing nothing. Pelagia comes to believe in ghosts when she starts to see Corelli's ghost every year at the anniversary of the massacre, and she pretends that she's Italian.

I have not brought her up to be a domestic slave, for the simple reason that such company would have been tedious in the absence of a son. Podimatas - who between 1946 and 1971 spent a total of 17 years in prison or camps without trial for his political activity - weeps as he tells the story.

In that the novel deals with civilian life in a time of war, Captain Corelli's Mandolin also shares similarities with Euripides's play The Trojan Women. In the fall, however, Italy deposed their fascist dictator Mussolini and surrendered to the Allied forces--though things were complicated by the fact that Italy also promised its troops to the Germans. After the Italian troops on Cephalonia threatened mutiny if they were forced to cooperate with the Germans, General Gandin, the commanding officer of the Acqui Division, agreed to stand and attempt to defeat the Germans. million copies, clocking up 240 weeks on the bestseller list - making its author, Louis de Bernières, a rich man and sending an electric current through the tourist industry on the island of Cephalonia, where it is set.

The problem is not so much the downside of the expected tourist invasion, or the occasional traumatic flashback triggered by the sound of gunfire from the film set. The Italian-German confrontation and subsequent massacres were a defining moment of modern Cephalonian history. When he's well enough Corelli moves to an abandoned shack and then Bunnios smuggles him off the island. Though he joined the army when he was 18, he only made it four months in the officer training course and then moved on to attending several universities, including Victoria University of Manchester and the University of London. An Eton-educated British agent is introduced to Iannis and made to speak a Chaucerian English that is the novel's equivalent of the classical Greek he employs.The problem is that it just dragged on and on, and while the characters were realistic and fully fleshed out, I just didn’t relate to them. Far from killing Italians who escaped the German slaughter, the resistance - including the parents of Dionisis Georgatos, Cephalonia’s present-day governor - hid them and helped spirit them off the island. She fetches Mandras’s mother Drosoula and the two women attend to Mandras's many ailments, which makes Pelagia realize she wants to be a doctor. I saw this movie first years ago and decided to read the book for clarity on Carlos' role in the story which is quite vague in the movie.