set to music by Schubert. It reads: Meine Ruh ist hin, Mein Herz ist schwer, Ich finde sie nimmer und nimmermehr. Which translates as: My peace is gone, My heart is sore [lit. "heavy"], I will find it never and nevermore. Real story and precedents Bernières has denied that the character of Corelli is based on Amos Pampaloni who was then an Italian artillery captain in Cephalonia, despite the many similarities in their stories. Pampaloni survived execution, joined the Greek People's Liberation Army, the Partisans in the Greek civil war, and fought with them in Epirus for fourteen months. Pampaloni was interviewed by The Guardian newspaper in 2000 and expressed the view that the novel misrepresented the Greek partisan movement. The novel also shows some similarities to Bandiera bianca a Cefalonia, a novel by Marcello Venturi published in 1963, translated in English as The White Flag (1969). Reception The Orlando Sentinel called Corelli's Mandolin a "radically traditionalist" novel, "a good nourishing tale full of true things, historical and psychological, spiced with opinion and contrariness, with not one dollop of regard for artistic fashion." The Cleveland Plain Dealer praised the multiple emotional levels of the novel, remarking, "Like Puccini, de Bernières can evoke golden narrative, full of both pain and gladness." Gene Hyde wrote, "To defy Sisyphus and rebel against the absurd, especially in the face of war, is an excruciatingly difficult and noble task. The beauty of Bernières' unique and deeply moving novel is his insistence that our hope lies in these seemingly quixotic impulses." Awards 1995 – Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book 2004 – 19th place on The Big Read Adaptations Radio The novel was adapted as four 45-minute radio plays from 17–20 September 2007 on BBC Radio 4, having been chosen as a popular "Book of the Week" on the same station some years earlier. The episode titles were "A Pea in the Ear," "Invasion of the Italians," "Looking for Snails" and "Earthquake." It was narrated by Tom Goodman-Hill, with Celia Meiras as Pelagia, Stephen Greif as Dr Iannis, Daniel Philpott as Corelli. The mandolin music for it was composed and performed by Alison Stephens, and the production was produced and directed by David Hunter. Other cast members included: Carlo – Anthony Psaila Mandras – Chris Pavlo Velisarios – Alexi Kaye Campbell Father Arsenios – Alex Zorbas Lemoni – Ania Gordon Drosoula – Anna Savva Hector –