Sophie’s Choice

Ingram
In this ambitious bestseller (made into a major motion picture starring Meryl Streep), Styron tells of a young Southerner who wants to become a writer; of the turbulent love-hate affair between a brilliant Jew and a beautiful Polish woman; and of an awful wound in the woman’s past, one that impels Sophie toward destruction. Reissue.

Inside Flap Copy
Three stories are told: a young Southerner wants to become a writer; a turbulent love-hate affair between a brilliant Jew and a beautiful Polish woman; and of an awful wound in that woman’s past–one that impels both Sophie and Nathan toward destruction.

Book Description
Three stories are told: a young Southerner wants to become a writer; a turbulent love-hate affair between a brilliant Jew and a beautiful Polish woman; and of an awful wound in that woman’s past–one that impels both Sophie and Nathan toward destruction.

Sophie’s Choice was possibly the most devastating book I ever read. After reading it, one can’t stop remembering the tragic plot of a Nazi death camp survivor, her life in Poland and the camps and her post-war relationship with an unstable man in New York. However, the book is about much more as well. In the narrator Stingo’s lyrical words, it is about a „voyage of discovery in a place as strange as Brooklyn.“

The book begins with Stingo being fired/quitting a Manhattan publishing job and taking a summer off to write the great American novel in a rooming house in Brooklyn. Stingo is an innocent in life and the ways of love. In the rooming house, he meets the sensual holocaust survivor, Sophie, his upstairs neighbor and her across-the-hall neighbor and lover, the brilliant and yet haunted Nathan. It is odd that Nathan is the haunted one, because Sophie is a survivor of Auschwitz, the Polish Nazi death camp while Nathan is a pharmaceutical researcher with a beautiful lover.

Stingo immediately falls in love with Sophie, but is also impressed by Nathan who takes Stingo under his wing as his protege of sorts. Stingo spends the summer writing and trying to lose his innocence in the ways of love. The plot lines dealing with the latter are graphic and may turn some people away. But people too young to be exposed to the language probably shouldn’t read this book anyway because of the explicitness of the holocaust plot.

Sophie gives clues about what happened to her in Poland during the war both inside and outside the death camp, but nothing prepares you for the actual final story she tells about her experiences. Reading that story will almost make you forget the beauty and lyricism of the rest of the book, but in looking back, you will realize that the book is an amazing combination of the beauty of life and the horror of it all twisted together in one perfect whole.

I heartily recommend this book.

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The first paragraph of this book is perhaps one of the finest examples of modern English diction ever written, inescapably drawing the reader into the lives of a young writer from Dixie, a Gentile holocaust survivor with a haunted past, and her mad Jewish lover. Styron’s mellifluous Southern voice weaves an unforgettable story of Stingo, the struggling Thomas Wolfe-in-waiting, cast adrift in the postwar boroughs of New York City. There, in the „kingdom of the Jews,“ he is witness to his neighbor Sophie’s tortured recovery from her own and the world’s Holocaust nightmare. Never preachy, Styron nonetheless teaches us about the darkness, the fragility and the strength of the human soul. Despite its macabre subject matter, the book is a paen to delirious, doomed hope, a raised Grail upon the Brooklyn Bridge to the unrelenting forgiveness in a spindly blade of grass emerging from a charred patch of Earth. Unwittingly or not, Styron has truly captured the tragedy and triumph of the Jewish experience: It is not about Judgment Day, only morning, beautiful and fair

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I was recommended to read this book. I did. And I was awfully disappointed. The language was very coarse ~~ it doesn’t do any justice to the English language at all. There was hardly any story line at all and I was more interested in hearing about Sophie’s Choice ~~ but it never happened till the very end. I wasted my time reading this book because they said the story was worth it. I had to read through pages of sexual lust and a young man’s preoccupation for sex.

Then when I do get to Sophie’s story ~~ it wasn’t written in a moving way. I have read much better accounts of survivors who have actually survived the camps ~~ their stories are so much more heart wrenching and tragic ~~ this novel should have been written by a woman. It does not do justice to Sophie or millions of other victims of the horror story that was Germany in the 1930s.

I had high hopes for this novel ~~ but this is one I can guarantee that I won’t be reading again.

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It’s not surprising that Sophie’s Choice is considered by many to be one of the great novels of the twentieth century. Styron imbues his characters and story with a life of their own. Like many great books (such as Nabokov’s masterpiece, Lolita), Sophie’s Choice combines elements of Comedy, Drama, Tragedy, and Horror into a compelling whole which draws the reader in. The three main characters are beautifully fleshed out, as are many of the minor characters. Much has been said about the major characters by other reviewers, I’ll mention two minor ones. I found the whole Leslie Lapidus episode to be hilarious. She is a perfectly believable character, and Stingo’s experiences with her added some levity to what is often a very somber story. The other minor character I found interesting (for different reasons) was Rudolf Hoses, the Commandant of Auschwitz-Birkenau. His character was disturbing precisely because he was such an ordinary man. In a different time and place, he would have been a petty government bureaucrat, perhaps working for the IRS. He studies septic system diagrams for the camp, and gets migraines worrying about production delays in building the new crematorium at Birkenau. In one scene, he sits with Sophie (his secretary) in his attic office at Auschwitz, gazing out the window at his Arabian stallion in its paddock, and marveling at its beauty. From the other side of the house, Sophie hears the constant rumble of the boxcars shunting off the main line with their human cargo. The juxtaposition of the two is quite creepy, and illustrates the complete moral disconnect of the man. What he does for a living would be much easier to explain if he were some kind of sadistic psychopath, but he doesn’t even seem particularly anti-semitic. It is his ordinariness which is so disturbing, and it is Styron’s power as a writer which brings such characters to life. –

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A chilling depiction of how the Holocaust’s reign of terror extended far beyond life in concentration camps. Sophie’s abusive relationship with Nathan and her inability to leave him are the result of her abuse at the hands of Nazi Germany. While reading I thought that her ‚choice‘ would be to choose either Stingo or Nathan…..although that indeed was a choice of hers, when I read of what her real ‚choice‘ was I was shocked. Not an uplifting book, but powerful and worth reading. Additionally, I have never seen such a vast use of diction in a novel. The wide vocabulary usage was far above anything I had read previously.

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I made the decision to read Sophie’s Choice after revisiting the Modern Library’s 100 best books of the 20th century. I’ve found that sometimes „classics“ can be technically perfect and admirable masterpieces yet not always engaging. This certainly does not pertain to William Styron’s novel.

Few books have had me so riveted or emotionally drained after reading them. The saga of Sophie’s story is a monumental piece of writing by Styron. Slowly but surely, he builds the story. He expertly weaves real life characters from Auschwitz into the narrative, chillingly recreating that awful scenario.

The main character, Stingo, begins to peel back layers of the truth with flashbacks to pre-war and then occupied Poland. Stark recollections from an emotionally drained Sophie bring descriptions of the terror of life in the concentration camps. From her bourgeous life to these camps and the (as one review aptly put it)unspeakable evil of the decision she was forced to make. It is a stunning moment and one that makes the awful conclusion understood.

One of the best novels I have read in years.

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The work of William Styron, which includes novels such as SOPHIE’S CHOICE and THE CONFESSIONS OF NAT TURNER, has generated both praise and controversy over the past fifty years. Grounded in history and epic in sweep, his fiction has grappled with some of the most harrowing events and unresolved moral questions of our time. He combines a concern for history and the fundamental needs of a healthy society with personal exploration to consistently create writing of intense depth.

William Styron was born on June 11, 1925 in Newport News, Virginia. His father was a shipyard engineer who suffered from depression and his mother passed away when he was only thirteen. A rebellious child, Styron was sent to a boys’ preparatory school soon after his mother’s death. Moving from school to school, he eventually ended up at Duke University, where he received his Bachelor of Arts. The next year he enlisted in the Marine Corps, where he became a first lieutenant during World War II.

After leaving the service, he moved to New York, where he supported his fledgling writing career working at McGraw-Hill Publishing. He also began taking classes with Hiram Haydn at the New School for Social Research. With guidance and encouragement from Haydn, Styron made his stunning debut at the age of twenty-six with LIE DOWN IN DARKNESS (1951). This novel launched his career and earned him the American Academy’s Prix de Rome. Told under the shadow of the Hiroshima bombing, LIE DOWN IN DARKNESS charts the tragic descent into suicide of a young woman raised in a troubled Virginia family.

He followed LIE DOWN IN DARKNESS with THE LONG MARCH (1957), SET THIS HOUSE ON FIRE (1960), and one of his most famous novels, THE CONFESSIONS OF NAT TURNER (1967). Published at the height of the civil rights movement, THE CONFESSIONS OF NAT TURNER is told from the point of view of the historical figure that led a disastrous and bloody slave insurrection which set the stage for the Civil War. Winning a Pulitzer Prize, THE CONFESSIONS OF NAT TURNER was both praised as a brave look into a rarely represented life, and maligned for what many saw as a clichéd conception of a black man.

Styron’s next novel did not appear for more than ten years. The tragedy of SOPHIE’S CHOICE (1979) is played out between a young Virginia writer and a Polish Holocaust survivor in an urban Jewish enclave of Brooklyn. It takes place during the aftermath of World War II, an era Styron describes as „a nightmarish Sargasso Sea of guilt and apprehensions.“ In SOPHIE’S CHOICE, Styron weaves a fictional tale, profound in its engagement, with major recent historical events. Made into a popular movie starring Meryl Streep, SOPHIE’S CHOICE returned Styron to the popular eye as both a controversial personality and a major writer.

The same year as the movie SOPHIE’S CHOICE appeared, Styron produced a book of essays entitled THE QUIET DUST & OTHER WRITINGS. His next great work, however, was not until his 1990 book, DARKNESS VISIBLE: A MEMOIR OF MADNESS. Addressing questions of depression, suicide, and alcoholism, DARKNESS VISIBLE is a beautiful and personal account of the effects of depression. In a sense it is the continuation of his social and political concerns manifested in an investigation of the personal core of our lives in society.

Throughout the 1990s, Styron continued to write, publish, edit, and receive numerous awards for his contributions to American literature. Authoring A TIDEWATER MORNING: THREE TALES FROM YOUTH (1993) and FATHERS AND DAUGHTERS: IN THEIR OWN WORDS (1994, with Mariana Ruth Cook) and winning the National Medal of Arts and the Common Wealth Award, Styron has secured his place in the history of literature. His thought-provoking work will long remain important to readers interested in the serious workings of the mind and heart of contemporary society.