Why did it take me so long? Several rather bad reasons: a) it was longer than 200 pg (aka the length of your typical children's book/YA) and b) I had issues with motivation because I committed the cardinal sin of reading and skipped ahead to skim the ending.
Despite all that, I stuck with it, because the characters drew me in. There's this catlike animal called Psipsina that was just so CUTE I squealed every time she made an appearance. Captain Corelli was adorable, and I really resent the fact that they put Nicholas Cage on the cover of my book because gaaaah gross miscast. The same goes for Penelope Cruz, for whom I harbor an inexplicable resentment (the Tom Cruise connection?). Pelagia, the character Penelope plays, is terribly entertaining. Despite the whole epic nature of the story, the characters are very real because De Bernieres animates them with a sparkling, playful sense of humor amid the tragedy. There is also a deep nostalgia, in the Odysseus sense of longing for home as well as in the longing for history. I guess the author took the whole Greek thing to heart, and it shows in his writing. There's one passage that communicates that pretty well that I particularly enjoyed when I read it, because it somehow articulated the overwhelming feeling of the sublime that you get when you finish a hike to the top of a mountain (after the wheezing stops):
"The second thing that struck me, curiously enough, was the incredible size and antiquity of the olive trees...they made me feel strangely ephemeral, as though they had seen people like us a thousand times, and had watched us depart. They had a quality of patient omniscience...here it was possible to place one's hand on that antique bark, look up at the fragments of sky that glittered through the canopy, and feel dwarfed by the sensation that others might have done this very thing under this very tree a millennium before."
Fun fun. I'm reading Hemingway now, because he's terse, and I could probably learn something from him.
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