Corelli's Mandolin

This dark yet dazzling tour de force invigorates the genre of antiwar comedies in the style of Hasek, Heller and Vonnegut. Bernieres sweeps across a 50 year history of a glorious Greek Island at peace and at war and simultaneously homes in on its panoply of major and minor characters and the Italians forced by Mussolini to invade them. The fusion of Greek and Christian mythologies in Cephalonia makes for rollicking scenes such as the Feast of St. Gerasimos, with its miracle cures and drunken stupors. The barbaric, paranoid absurdity of Mussolini and his ill-prepared, ill-led and unwilling army makes both for high comedy and blood curdling scenes of starvation, misery and death. The humanizing role of the arts, musical and medical, informs it all. Because Berniers's farce and fury erupt through a witty word play carefully tone shifts, listening to this novel is, in some ways, even better than reading it. Lang fearlessly carries listeners through swiftly changing currents of tenderness and horror, kindness and cruelty. With his fine array of Greek, Italian and British accents, he masterfully reveals the soaring emotional range across and within characters. Even the lengthy tirades of fascist dictators and communist dogmatists are rendered with passionate, painful and refreshing irony. Based on the 1994 Pantheon hardcover. (Jan.)