Dr. Iannis counsels Pelagia and Corelli in turn. He tells Pelagia to wait to marry Corelli until after the war, as that's the only way she'll know if their love is genuine. He tells Corelli that Pelagia has a dark and mysterious other side, as all Greeks do, and cautions him against making plans. 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. “On June 5, 1944, the Germans hanged five resistance members in the main square because the andartes had killed a collaborator. They forced everyone they found on the streets to go there and set up four machine guns around us. One of the five, Dionisis Ratsiatos, was my teacher - I loved that man. There was a father and son, Gavrilis and Vasilis Rallatos, and the father was forced to watch his son hanged twice, because the rope broke the first time they strung him up. They hanged them from two trees. The youngest to die that day was Spiros Analitis, in his early 20s. The German commander announced through an interpreter that he would be freed if he gave information about the resistance. Analitis didn’t reply, but called to the crowd, ‘You, tyranny-fighting youth, will avenge our deaths.’ “

Different voices find many forms. There are letters; there are political diatribes; there are speeches and sermons. Equally, the chapters of third-person narrative reflect many different viewpoints. Most often we see events through the eyes of Iannis, or Pelagia, or Corelli, but free indirect style gives us the thoughts of many others, from Mina, the mad girl who is to be "cured" by Saint Gerasimos, to Lieutenant Weber, the "good Nazi", confused by the habits of his Italian allies. The collection of narratives is made to enact an understanding of human variety.There is a plaque marking the spot where the five hanged, as there are monuments all over the island commemorating resistance fighters killed during the occupation or the civil war. In Zervata, in the mountains above Sami, a bust of the legendary Cephalonian ELAS commander, Astrapioannos, is the centrepiece of a garden of remembrance to the fallen partisans. Further up the mountainside, surrounded by caves and now inhabited only by goats and wild dogs, lie the ruins of the village of Mouzakata, his wartime guerilla hide-out - first bombed by the Germans, later by government forces with British support during the civil war, and finally abandoned after Cephalonia’s devastating 1953 earthquake. I had high hopes going into this one and I’m sad to say that it left me a little disappointed. de Bernieres’ writing style is excellent and the actual book felt almost poetic because of the way in which it was written. 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.

Even Podimatas’s record of persecution fails to match the experience of Vangelis Neochorotis, a 91-year-old Cephalonian veteran of both the resistance and the Greek-Italian war of 1940-1941, who spent 21 years in prison and whose brother was executed during the civil war. Both he and his brother, like thousands of others, refused an offer of release if they signed a statement renouncing communism. Sitting in the garden of the house in Paliki he has lived in since the 30s with his wife Amalia - herself a former EAM member who was tortured after the war - Neochorotis gives his view of the Corelli story: “De Bernières’s book is an insult to the whole Greek people. But I believe it is also part of a global drive to rewrite history, to reverse historical facts, to convince people that political and social change is a dead end and that if you struggle for a better world, it only leads to bloodshed, suffering and failure.” A pamphlet appears on Cephalonia one day that makes fun of Mussolini and all the ways in which he's hypocritical and absurd. Corelli isn't charmed, though Carlo and Dr. Iannis are. Pelagia suggests that given the syntax, the pamphlet could've been written by conspiring Greeks and Italians, but when she sees her father and Carlo's reaction to this, she thinks they're stupid. A few days later, Corelli wakes up with a hangover, argues with Pelagia about his role in the war, and begins to compose "Pelagia's March." The Greek doctor Dr. Iannis attempts to write an impartial history of his island, Cephalonia. However, he finds he cannot do so without getting angry about the numerous Greek conquests, so he amends his title to read "A Personal History of Cephalonia." In the village, his daughter Pelagia falls in love with a young fisherman named Mandras. They get engaged in August on the feast day of St. Gerasimos, but Pelagia is unhappy about it. Dr. Iannis refuses to provide a dowry, suggests Mandras is too uneducated to appreciate Pelagia, and counsels that they should wait to get married until after the war. Dr. Iannis spends most of his time at the kapheneia with his friends Stamatis and Kokolios, who are royalist and communist respectively. Though they used to fight about politics, as the war moves towards Greece, the three band together for the sake of their country. Dr. Iannis also adopts a pine marten that the child Lemoni names Psipsina. I should probably mention that I read this entirely based on http://www.thisonenext.com, and I am quite impressed. This book is absolutely me.By the second chapter, I had the distinct impressions that this was one of those gems of a book that should not ever, ever, ever be made into a movie, ever. For perspective, I feel this way about Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and do not feel it about Lord of the Rings. The problem with these "feelings" is that I won't ever be able to investigate them, because if I read a book like this I will categorically refuse to see the movie for fear of ruining the book, and if I see the movie first, I probably won't ever know. From the islanders’ point of view, no charge could be more wounding. The Italian-German confrontation and subsequent massacres were a defining moment of modern Cephalonian history. The only resistance force on the island was ELAS and its political wing, EAM, though neither organisation was exclusively, or even predominantly, communist. Both Greeks and Italian survivors testify that not only did the resistance give practical and armed support to the Italian troops, but 15 andartes lost their lives in the fighting. 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. Corelli begins to play mandolin for Pelagia and the two talk about their dreams for life after the war. Corelli wants to be a musician and for the first time, Pelagia voices her desire to be a doctor. Though Pelagia and Dr. Iannis continue to torment Corelli, Pelagia finds herself falling for him. She stares at him, touches him without thinking, and becomes gradually less angry with him. Dr. Iannis notices their budding romance and wonders what to do. Early one morning, Alekos the goatherd notices an angel falling from the sky. Alekos nurses the injured angel for two days before leading it to Dr. Iannis's house. Dr. Iannis discovers that the angel is actually a British spy, Bunnios, who speaks ancient Greek.