Captain Corelli's Mandolin

by Louis de Bernières

‘The garden where you sit Has never a need of flowers, For you are the blossoms And only a fool or the blind Would fail to know it.’

Why were they such sensitive animals, and yet simultaneously so boundlessly stupid, like poets and artists?

first came across him in the latrines of the encampment. His battery had a latrine known as ‘La Scala’ because he had a little opera club that shat together there at the same time every morning, sitting in a row on the wooden plank with their trousers about their ankles. He had two baritones, three tenors, a bass, and a counter-tenor who was much mocked on account of having to sing all the women’s parts, and the idea was that each man should expel either a turd or a fart during the crescendos, when they could not be heard above the singing. In this way the indignity of communal defecation was minimised, and the whole encampment would begin the day humming a rousing tune that they had heard wafting out of the heads.

a few sagging houses whose stones had lost their mortar and were held together only by gravity and habit,

Their existence was nothing but friction (no wonder their skins were smooth) and an eternity of ceilings.

‘Quite so,’ repeated Corelli, smiling politely, whereupon Arsenios waddled away in a manner intended to convey disgust and absolute certainty.

‘For a woman to obtain success, she is obliged either to weep, to nag, or to sulk. She must be prepared to do this for years, because she is the disposable property of the men of the family, and men, like rocks, take a long time to wear down.’

Love is a temporary madness, it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion, it is not the desire to mate every second minute of the day, it is not lying awake at night imagining that he is kissing every cranny of your body. No, don’t blush, I am telling you some truths. That is just being “in love”, which any fool can do. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossom had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two. But sometimes the petals fall away and the roots have not entwined. Imagine giving up your home and your people, only to discover after six months, a year, three years, that the trees have had no roots and have fallen over. Imagine the desolation. Imagine the imprisonment.

In those days Great Britain was less wealthy than it is now, but it was also less complacent, and considerably less useless. It had a sense of humanitarian responsibility and a myth of its own importance that was quixotically true and universally accepted merely because it believed in it, and said so in a voice loud enough for foreigners to understand.