I am truly disappointed by this book.

Given the nature of the story, I had extremely high expectations. However, I was deeply upset that William Styron used "Sophie's Choice" as the climax, while filling the middle pages with what seemed like fluff. And I use the term "climax" very loosely here.

What on earth was he thinking?!

"Sophie's Choice" is about a Polish woman, Sophie, who is imprisoned at Auschwitz along with her two children. Upon arrival, she is forced to make a devastating choice that will haunt her for the rest of her life. But, unbelievably, you don't find out about this "choice" until page 529, with only 33 pages remaining. All the while, you are bombarded with details about her life before Auschwitz and her rather crazy and bizarre love for Nathan, her lover.

Yes, it is a heart-wrenching story, and one that I had postponed reading for some time due to its subject matter. But it could have been so much more. It really SHOULD HAVE been something more profound, more moving, and more emotional. Instead, by the time the author developed the characters and allowed the reader to connect with them, I found myself not only loathing Sophie but also hoping that the book would end in a certain way so that she would finally be relieved of her misery, and I of mine as well.

William Styron filled the intervening pages with such juvenile nonsense that I often felt as if I was reading a Playboy forum or something similar. An overly sexualized Polish woman, a drug-addicted sadomasochistic Jewish lover, and a 22-year-old virgin friend with wet dreams - and now combine that with Auschwitz? No, thank you!

I have just changed my star rating from 3 to 2.

Sophie's Choice, by William Styron, is a profound and harrowing novel that was first published in 1979.

It delves into the complex relationships of three individuals sharing a boarding house in Brooklyn. Stingo, a young and ambitious writer from the South, has recently been fired from his job at McGraw-Hill and moves into the boarding house with the hope of devoting time to his writing.

While working on his novel, he becomes intertwined with the lives of Nathan Landau, a Jewish scientist, and his lover Sophie, a Polish Catholic survivor of the German Nazi concentration camps.

Sophie is a beautiful and tragic figure, haunted by her past experiences in the Holocaust. Nathan, on the other hand, claims to be a Harvard graduate and a cellular biologist, but it is later revealed that this is a lie.

In fact, Nathan suffers from paranoid schizophrenia, which causes him to have violent and delusional episodes. As the story unfolds, Sophie shares her past with Stingo, including her anti-Semitic father, her arrest by the Nazis, and her time as a stenographer-typist in the home of Rudolf Höss, the commander of Auschwitz.

She also reveals her failed attempt to save her son by seducing Höss and getting him into the Lebensborn program. The novel is a powerful exploration of love, guilt, and the human condition, and it has been widely regarded as one of the greatest works of literature about the Holocaust.

It has inspired numerous adaptations, including a 1982 film of the same name starring Meryl Streep. Sophie's Choice is a must-read for anyone interested in history, literature, or the human psyche.

**Original Article**: This is a simple story. A boy named Tom went to the park. He played with his friends there. They had a great time.

**Expanded Article**:

This is a rather simple yet charming story.

There was a boy whose name was Tom. One fine day, he decided to go to the park.

As soon as he arrived at the park, he saw his friends waiting for him.

They greeted each other with big smiles and immediately started playing various games.

They ran around, played hide-and-seek, and even had a little race.

Their laughter filled the air, and they were truly having a great time together in the park.

It was a wonderful day that Tom and his friends would always remember.

Mercifully, I was at an age where reading was still a passionate pursuit. It was, save for a happy marriage, the best state to keep absolute loneliness at bay. Without it, those evenings would have been unbearable. I was an abandoned reader, yet outlandishly eclectic, with an affinity for the written word - almost any written word - that was so excitable it bordered on the erotic. I mean this literally. Had I not compared notes with others who confessed to sharing this sensibility in youth, I'd be risking scorn or incredulity by saying that the prospect of half an hour with a Classified Telephone Directory once caused me a slight but noticeable tumescence.

The young William Styron had a similar passion for reading as I did. The anticipation of opening a new book was like parting the warm thighs of a new lover. The excitement of a new adventure, whether in the pages of a book or between the sheets of a bed, should produce the same tingles and sparks of grand passion. Reading is truly a love affair.

If you don't feel this way, I'm sorry. I once gave the same advice to a married woman who confessed she didn't enjoy sex. I asked her if she was sure she was doing it right. Maybe many of you are picking the wrong lovers or don't have the proper reading resume to make those passionate connections. Or perhaps your mind is too closed and needs to roam free. Keep trying.

This novel is a tale of lust and tragedy. At times, the narrative merges the tragedy of unfulfilled wishes with memories that won't stay forgotten. It's really two novels intertwined as the past intersects with the present. One part follows the trials of Sophie Zawistowska, a Polish citizen at Auschwitz-Birkenau during World War Two, and the other part is about the struggles of a young Southern writer in Brooklyn, New York, trying to write the great American novel.
Stingo first meets Sophie and her lover Nathan Landau while boarding at The Pink Palace. He hears them before he meets them, fornicating like amphetamine-drugged rabbits. For a person suffering from unmitigated passion, eavesdropping on others' lustful conquests is excruciating. Stingo is twenty-two, not only horny but also a virgin, a state most men wish to end as soon as possible. His desire to end his involuntary celibacy is consuming and even affects his ability to write his masterpiece.
William Styron infuses autobiography into this book under the guise of fiction. It's hard to separate the young Styron from the sexually frustrated Stingo. Styron was a master at describing lust, sometimes bordering on purple prose, yet capturing the true nature of hormonal desire in lush detail. He describes Stingo's neighbor, Mavis Hunnicutt, in a way that evokes Stingo's intense lust.
Stingo becomes best friends with Nathan and Sophie and gets caught up in their passionate affair. Their arguments are as epic as their sexual passions. Stingo rides their emotional rollercoaster, from cloud-dwelling amorousness to dark, abusive quarrels that shake his belief in their relationship.
Like most of us, Stingo wants the beautiful love story. And of course, along with his observations of Sophie and Nathan, he has an enduring love/lust for Sophie. She is lovely in appearance and character, the kind of woman most of us would be infatuated with if we knew her. And there is the constant reminder of her past, the tattoo on her forearm.
During the times Nathan and Sophie are split up, Stingo gets exclusive time with Sophie. She pours out her frustrations and fears about her relationship with Nathan and shares the horrid story of her time incarcerated by the Nazis. Hearing her story adds poignancy to Stingo's desire for her, making him long to give her a safe, happy life.
William Styron/Stingo has written a masterpiece. The honesty and humor about Stingo's sexual desire, combined with the tragedies of Sophie's life, take the reader on an emotional journey. We experience Stingo's inept conquests as he searches for a woman liberated enough to allow him to explore his desires. Stingo also struggles with his disloyal desire for Sophie while hoping she and Nathan will work things out. Mental health is explored in detail, a subject dear to Styron as he dealt with depression his whole life.
This book is unforgettable. I'll be able to recall scenes vividly for the rest of my life. How can I forget Stingo, Sophie, and Nathan? Their lives have become a part of mine. I can almost swear I lived at The Pink Palace and listened to their lovemaking. If you want to see more of my reviews, visit my website and Facebook page.

In Auschwitz, tell me, where was God?

And the answer: Where was man?

A terrible confession about the camp, obsessive love, youthful passion, religion, sexuality, the clash of cultures and guilt. All of this is mixed in this fantastic novel.

If it had had 150 - 200 fewer pages, for me, it would have been perfect. At one moment everything went in a circle and lost its point. But the end made up for everything.

I was left with no choice.

The book will not appeal to everyone, but if you decide to take it on, it will not leave you indifferent.

If a novel leaves an indelible memory and evokes a deep and expansive personal response, I count it as a great book. As a reader, my own story intersected this certainly autobiographical one in a special way. I took a short course called “Literature of the Holocaust” in 1980, a couple of years before this came out. So I was familiar with Wiesel, Barth, etc… and had enjoyed Corrie Ten Boom’s movie earlier and Anne Frank. When I was in high school, we talked a great deal about the Holocaust, and I hope they still do.

In 1982, I saw the movie version of this on the big screen with my wife, whom I married the following year and is upstairs sleeping right now. I was 21, and the protagonist (Stingo) was also a 22-year-old innocent suddenly living the life of a budding southern novelist in the big apple. It was 1947 and he was in the immigrant foreign Bronx neighborhood. Being from Kansas, I identified with this young fellow, and I have always loved narrator voice-over styles of movies. The film was breathtaking, especially Meryl Streep’s performance as Sophie. Her accents as a Polish multi-lingual refugee from the horrors of Auschwitz was, without exaggeration, one of the greatest dramatic feats in the history of film. My wife and I were already infatuated with her, having loved The Deer Hunter and The French Lieutenant’s Woman by then.

But it was not only the beautiful filmmaking and dramatic story line, but the shattering tragedy of the story line is simply unparalleled, in my reading life anyway. Stingo’s obsession with sex reminds me of my younger self, as my wife-to-be and I were discovering ourselves after our longstanding conservative upbringing. On top of that, I had been raised and encouraged to understand the Holocaust, and its attendant horrors were fresh. In fact, it continues to haunt me, as I now see in our political climate the tolerance for hatred and the ease with which we can demonize the “other”. The human psyche is vulnerable to fear which is all too easily channeled to hatred and can, sadly, erupt in genocide. For periods of my life, I’ve been more hopeful that humanity has moved to a more enlightened era, yet recently I see just how frail is that protective veneer. It saddens me, so when I finished this book last week it left me in something of a foreboding gloom.

I’ve always had a high tolerance for literary violence and strong subjects, as I want to face what’s really out there and hiding makes me even more anxious. So I don’t regret reading this, in fact I welcome the anger and anxiety it evokes. My reading buddy at work loves history and I haven’t yet convinced him (but I will) that great fiction is more “real” than facts / opinions. Sophie’s Choice is a great example of this: It is, in a way, historical fiction about the Holocaust. It brings to life in excruciating, sometimes excessively detailed what happened in Poland, Germany and America during and just after the Second World War. I have to believe this is largely autobiographical, reading about Styron’s life.

The book is big and messy, and Styron’s craft for storytelling, while jarringly dramatic, is not what one might consider skillful. I felt this way about Melville’s great work, that he had it in him and he just had to get it all out. I would guess this is Styron’s magnum opus, written later in life. He is, essentially, Stingo: A southern rube moved to the big city, somewhat smug and conceited about his own southern history, getting a rude awakening to the real world of Jews, Holocaust survivors, and how hatred is universal and intertwined. What Styron does exceptionally well is bring the reader along with Stingo’s voyage of discovery, as he finds the truth is deeper, much/much deeper, than he could possibly even imagine. It is an awakening, and told through the narrator’s voice (one I could relate to, being raised on a farm in Kansas), was affecting.

At over 600 pages, one can argue Styron needed an editor. In truth, I loved the details, the incredible historical information that is unpacked. I learned a great deal about history in Poland (their brand of anti-Semitism was likely as strong as that in Germany – to say nothing of the Nazi movement in the US in the 1930s), actual people in Auschwitz and Treblinka and Birkenau. The character sketches were nuanced, exquisitely detailed, and some of the deepest and most interesting I’ve read in fiction. Some interludes stretched the limits of credulity, but for me this was a minor flaw against a rich, majestic story. This book made me want to go back and read more and more deeply about what happened in Europe in the 1930s – I’m still stymied how it happened, the intersection of economic hardship, the fallout from WW1 decisions, and the freaky coincidence of factors that created the appetite for the murder of millions of people across Europe (and after, of course, it continues).

Styron likes to show off his impressive vocabulary, perhaps he had a thesaurus in hand and he rarely failed to use one adjective when several were possible. The scholarship in this regard is heavy, but I found it accurate and often necessary as Styron really labored to evoke his world and bring it to life for us.

The big reveal comes late for Sophie (most of you probably know what it is), but her lover Nathan’s issues are at least as interesting for me. I actually think I diagnosed his conditions independent of the authors. I’m pretty sure Nathan “had” bipolar disorder, not paranoid schizophrenia. Nonetheless, his mental deterioration and excessive use of stimulants led to Nathan’s terrifying swings and abject horror of coming “down”, leading to much of the cruelty he foists on Stingo and the shockingly violent degradation of his one true love, Sophie. Stingo’s discoveries are the heart of the book, along with his frustrated sexuality, and telling the story from this point of view is the genius of Styron. There are books within books here, as Sophie recounts her own biography in the camps in terrifying detail. Stingo even conceives of a future novel to write, about Nat Turner from his native Virginia.

I was actually glad to have seen the movie as it was so exceptional and peeked my interest in the author and story. The movie was just so exceptional. Usually I dislike seeing the movie first since I can’t get the actors’ faces out of my mind. But the movie is tighter, exceptional, and more focused on the excellent drama. In fact, I ordered it from Netflix and the disc is ready to be queued up now – being a cold rainy Saturday in Missouri, and my wife and I with some time on our hands. I wonder if it will evoke 1982 for us again, when we were younger in our relationship, before 3 adult kids and our bodies became creakier. Bottom line, this book greatly enriched my experience with one of the greatest stories ever told in fiction.

Bandymas aprėpti neaprėpiama yra labai įdomus, tačiau nėra be prieštaravimų. Jame aptariami tokios svarbios temos kaip semitizmas ir antisemitizmas, JAV Pietų ir Šiaurės santykiai 1947 m., narkotikai, potrauminis sindromas ir Sofi kaltės jausmas. Autorius yra 22 metų besiblaškančio jaunuolio, kuris pasakoja apie savo nuotykius ir brandą.

Nė kiek nesistebiu, kad knyga buvo uždrausta Lenkijoje, nes autorius pabrėžia lenkų antisemitizmą. Tačiau jis taip pat nepamiršta JAV Pietų rasizmo. Knyga gali būti nepriimtina tiek lenkams, tiek žydams, tiek vokiečiams, tiek JAV pietiečiams. Tai reiškia, kad knyga turi daug prieštaravimų.

Skaitydamas epizodą, kuriame Sofi turi pasirinkti, kuris jos vaikas liks gyvas, prisiminiau analogišką situaciją iš A. Kamiu romano „Krytis“. Manau, kad knygos pavadinimas nėra dėl šio pasirinkimo, tačiau yra ir kitų svarbių momentų.

Knygoje yra daug publicistinių intarpų ir istorinių įžvalgų, kurie kartais gali būti nuobodūs. Tačiau taip pat yra daug meistriškai parašytų epizodų, kurie meniškai ir psichologiškai įtaigiai atskleidžia veikėjų charakterius.

Patiko knygoje pateikta romėno Lukrecijaus mintis apie mokslą ir meną. Manau, kad visa tai – pliusai ir minusai – yra vienoje labai įdomioje knygoje. Skaitydamas ją, aš dažnai prisiminiau kitas svarbias knygas, tokias kaip V. E. Frankl „Žmogus ieško prasmės“ ir P. Claudel „Brodekas“. Tačiau ne visad „Sofi pasirinkimas“ buvo naudas.

Romanas apie beprotybę dviese yra labai svarbus, tačiau nėra be prieštaravimų. Skaitydamas jį, aš dažnai pagalvojau apie tai, kaip beprotystė gali būti užkrečiama.

It was a fortunate thing that I missed the Oscar-nominated movie adaptation of this book when it was shown in 1985. My curiosity to uncover the true meaning of the "choice" in the title compelled me to keep turning the pages until it was disclosed towards the end. There are actually two choices.

Sophie, the beautiful Polish (non-Nazi) Holocaust survivor, has to decide which of her two lovers she will end up with. On one hand, there is the Jewish Nathan Landau, a crazy junkie who brought her to America. On the other hand, there is the struggling American, Stingo, who is also the narrator of the story. The other Sophie's choice should remain hidden as it is the best part of the book. So, if you have neither seen the movie nor read this book, please do not click this: Sophie had to choose which of her son and daughter would go to the concentration camp and which would die by gassing. She chose her son to survive and her daughter to die. That is an incredibly awful choice that no parent would ever want to make as both options are unbearable. Burn in hell, you Nazis.

This is my first encounter with Styron, and I am impressed. His prose may not be truly exceptional, but it is highly readable. He has a tendency to be overly melodramatic, similar to Pat Conroy's The Prince of Tides, but at least his characters are multi-dimensional. There are only three main characters in this book, but I could almost sense them coming alive from the pages. There are no clear heroes or villains among them. Styron simply presented them as they are, and so the first choice - who is the better man - should have been extremely difficult for Sophie. In the end, I thought her decision was unwise, but having it the other way around would not have had the same impact that Styron probably intended for his readers to feel.

My favorite character is Sophie, and her best moment is in the scene when she tells Stingo that she steals menus from restaurants because she likes to take them home as souvenirs. This was Styron's way of showing the quirkiness of her character at the start, and then he completely transformed her by revealing what she had to endure in living with Nathan and, ultimately, what she had to go through to come to the US and flee her war-torn country, Poland.

The theme of this book is racism in all its forms: blunt vs. subtle, past vs. present, external vs. internal. The Holocaust that occurred in Europe is the blunt, past, and external form of racism. The many forms of racial discrimination that are still happening, not only in the US but also in other countries, even here in the Philippines, are the subtle, present, and internal forms.

My only minor complaint is the excessive use of the F word and the numerous sex scenes, which could potentially muddle the meaning of the story as sometimes I felt I was reading an erotica. I think Styron went a little too far with these. Otherwise, it is a story with a powerful message, a heart-wrenching plot, well-developed characters, and a shocking ending that would be more than enough reason for you to keep reading. This is a long 626-page read, but it is definitely worth your time.

I should read Styron's more popular work, The Confessions of Nat Turner, soon. He is so good that I can't wait to have a second taste.

On January 3, 2016, it marked two weeks since I last read literature. Just ten minutes ago, I finished my cigarette. As I was smoking, in the quiet, I sank into a deep meditation about the books I had read in the past and which, more or less consciously, had deeply embedded in my consciousness. Suddenly, I remembered Nathan Landau, the key character in the novel "Sophie's Choice". When I was reading the book, this manic-depressive left me with a horribly pejorative impression. I couldn't understand his fits of jealousy, why he lived in Sophie's past, how she could accept him as her only salvation even though she was often beaten to a pulp. In the end, I couldn't understand the contrast between Nathan's chosen, even aristocratic manners and his destructive outbursts.

My previous thinking, which was closely related to the process of posterior knowledge, has now made me, when the subject of the book is no longer so well-defined, but the character of the characters remains immaculate, see Nathan Landau as a human prototype worthy of all pity and love.

The American would surely say "WOW!!" and the authentic Romanian would say " 'ai să-mi bag p**a ce bună a fost!".

In fact, this book kept me captivated and I only put it down because I had to take the appropriate meal and cigarette breaks (although sometimes I smoked while flipping through the pages).

The atmosphere introduced me to New York in 1947, in the midst of the post-war economic recession, where Stingo, the main character and narrator (so first-person narrative), was hired as an editor at a major publishing house. He is later fired for "excessive zeal" (he despised all the manuscripts that fell into his hands) and retires to Brooklyn, where he intends to conceive a novel and then send it to a major publisher. By chance, in the house he rented, he meets Sophie Zawistowska, a Polish survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp, and her lover, Nathan Landau, a young Jewish intellectual. Stingo will be their best friend. He falls in love with Sophie and becomes Nathan's academic discussion partner.

Goodness! What a tragic love between the two - Nathan and Sophie - and what devastating crises sometimes attack the Jew. It is later discovered that he is completely crazy, that he has fits of rage and often wants to kill his lover out of jealousy.

The narrative subtly brings out the whole story of Sophie from Auschwitz, the whole Nazi atrocity to which not only the Jews were subjected, but also the Poles, Czechs and Russians. A remark that held the stereotype, quoting from the novel, would be: "Misfortune marks the soul to its depths with contempt, disgust, even hatred for oneself and the sense of guilt, which crime should, logically, arouse, but does not."

In Sophie's confession about the dark days at Auschwitz, Rudolf Hoss (I knew of Hess, but in the book it's Hoss), the commandant of the camp, also appears. The commandant's sober spirit is reflected in his crimes ("most of the crimes attributed to the military were committed with the advice and consent of the civilian authorities"). There is also a psychological aspect of mass criminals, namely the fact that they consider themselves victims because they have seen the crime with their own eyes and, therefore, have suffered enough: "So, instead of saying: what horrible sufferings I caused to people, the murderers were able to exclaim: what horrors I had to witness while fulfilling my duties; how heavy the duty weighed on my shoulders!".

If I were to bring into discussion at least 10% of the psychology of the novel, I would need about ten pages, but it's not in my nature. Nevertheless, remarks like "I remember the name of an obscene phenomenon I read about [...]: the need to use an obscene language often found in young women" (In the context, it was a Jewish woman, very vulgar and, apparently, a noble whore, but before a possible sexual act, she exclaims: "I'm a virgin!". The protagonist replies: "It's no offense, believe me, but I have the impression that you're a very sick virgin!").

The novel is also an inner confession: the author, writing more than 20 years after what happened (because it is, in fact, an autobiography), relives, through "affective memory", all those moments. "...... based on the reasoning that if life is an expression of evil, then it is necessary to hasten its end" => "The only unexpected aspect for me, he observes, was that I would be brought back to life in this crazy twentieth century."

From Sophie's confession, regarding the days at Auschwitz: "Sleep offered the only certain escape from the pitiless torments and, rather curiously, it usually generated pleasant dreams, because people so close to dementia would have gone completely crazy if, escaping from one nightmare, they had to face another in sleep."

Hate for the world, after a tortured life: "the only reason we consider suicide an immoral act is this idiotic sentimentalism, softened in the Judeo-Christian ethos" or "I sometimes come to believe that life is nothing but a hideous trap!".

It is understandable that, having no one else in the world (Sophie's parents, husband and two children having been killed by the Nazis), she loved Nathan with all her heart.

The title of the book is given after the end, a sublime end that I don't believe I'm capable of writing about, an end that should be titled "A study on the overcoming of pain".

10+!

Andrei Tamaș,

August 14, 2015

Skôr 3,5*.

Previously, I struggled with this book because its style is rather drawn-out and the book could have been at least one-third shorter. I have very little patience (virtually none) for the author's self-pitying autobiographical outpourings. He knew that if he wrote those outpourings just like that (as Heller did in Something Happened), not even a dog would bark at them. So he combined them with the theme of concentration camps, the Holocaust, and a surviving Jewess. Many things regarding the small Sophie's events and places I couldn't believe, but Nathan's and Sophie's self-destructive behaviors were shockingly real. Their relationship was what kept me reading the book. And yes, after reading the book, I understood that Sophie's choice is not what we all know (from the movie), but rather a series of decisions that ultimately lead to that completely final and fatal one.

This book, although having its flaws in style and some unbelievable details, still manages to grip the reader with the complex and tragic relationship between the characters. It makes one think about the choices people make during difficult times and the consequences that follow. The combination of the personal and the historical aspects adds depth to the story and makes it a memorable read.

Overall, while it may not be a perfect book, it does have its redeeming qualities that make it worth considering for those interested in stories about the Holocaust and the human condition.

I should probably begin by stating that my copy of Sophie's Choice has taken up residence under my stairs. It's in a plastic box, right next to all the other dire books I've had the misfortune to read. They're all currently residing there until I can donate them to the book farm or anywhere else but under my roof.

This book took me an inordinately long time to read, and the sole reason for that is simple: it was a terrible book.

I had been eagerly anticipating getting to this book. After reading the intriguing premise (I usually enjoy Holocaust themed writing), I was expecting to experience a wide range of overwhelming emotions. But, of course, there wasn't a vast array of emotions at all. There was only one, and that was anger.

The theme of the Holocaust was handled pathetically in this book. The writing was flowery and irritating, lacking an ounce of feeling. This caused me to feel nothing for the Holocaust survivor, Sophie. She was a character I grew to dislike more as the story progressed, and I blame that on the choice of narrative.

Styron can write, that's for sure, but he has the most irritating prose I've ever come across. Instead of writing about something that took place in simple, yet effective terms, he has to go one better and adorn it with unnecessary flourishes. Sometimes I can tolerate that, but as the plot was already weak, the writing style only added to my vexation.

Stingo, our mid-twenties narrator, is a writer who spends his days moping around his work, thinking about sex, thinking about his constant erection (and masturbating at the same time). Then, when he meets Sophie, a Holocaust survivor, all he can think about is taking her to his bed. I can tell you, fellow readers, I know more about Stingo's lonely penis than I do about the Holocaust.

What this book lacked was another point of view. Why couldn't we hear things from Sophie's perspective? After all, she is the main character of this story, isn't she? When Stingo finally discovers the horrors Sophie endured at the concentration camps, he vows to make her story known to the world. But he's so dizzy with lust and the desire to get her into bed that it never happens.

There are many themes in this book, including the Holocaust and mental health, but they're not explored or elaborated on. They just pop up and then pass through the characters and the plot like ships in the night. Instead, we're treated to yet another description of Stingo and his raging erection.

The book also angers me because I feel like Sophie wasn't given a voice. When she told Stingo about her life, I felt like she wasn't allowed to speak without him interrupting her or telling her he knew exactly how she felt. How could he possibly know that? It made me feel like Sophie was just a prop for Styron to get his personal opinions on paper.

It's a real shame that this book was written in such a strange and detached way. If more work had been put into Sophie, actually allowing her to be a fully developed character, this might have turned out quite differently.

Onion Skins

If you have the fortune to read this literary gem for the first time without prematurely pigeonholing it into a specific genre, let alone being privy to the background of the title character or the essence of her "choice," consider yourself truly fortunate. One of the many joys of this book, and make no mistake, there are indeed joys, lies in the manner in which Styron gradually unveils his secrets, much like delicately peeling away the skins of an onion. The first inkling of the horrors lurking in the background surfaces as early as page 54 of the Vintage edition. However, the true meaning of the title remains shrouded in mystery until the penultimate chapter, a full almost 500 pages later. In between, the tension steadily mounts as detail after detail unfolds, yet the story simultaneously warms and deepens as the reader gains a more intimate understanding of the characters. Despite its underpinning of death, Sophie's Choice is, triumphantly, a novel about life.

Many reviewers on Amazon have expressed sentiments along the lines of "I procrastinated reading this because I anticipated it would be depressing, but it was well worth it." But imagine if you had no such preconception. You would discover a book that is often uproariously funny, at least in its opening chapters, and permeated with a pervasive eroticism throughout. For contrary to what the title might suggest, the Polish refugee Sophie is not the central character. This distinction belongs to the narrator, a 22-year-old writer from the South, affectionately nicknamed Stingo but clearly a proxy for the author himself, who has journeyed to the big city to seek his fortune. After a comically ill-suited stint as a blurb-writer for a Manhattan publisher, he comes into a modest sum of money and relocates to a boarding house in Brooklyn, where he encounters Sophie and her lover Nathan Landau. Despite being in the midst of his career, Styron deliberately adopts the tone of a coming-of-age novel and executes it with absolute precision. Even absent the story of Sophie and Nathan, this would still rank as a significant American novel, a sort of postgraduate rendition of Catcher in the Rye, flawlessly capturing that moment of precarious balance between a bygone past and an uncertain future that was America in 1947. When he is not penning immortal prose or indulging in fantasies of sexual conquest, Stingo is undergoing a crash course in the real world, an education that is far more multifaceted than any synopsis could convey. On one level, this is a book about the writing process: the attempt to assimilate and make sense of the deluge of information and emotions bombarding you from all directions. I can think of few other books that so convincingly convey what it means to be a writer.

Of course, I am acutely aware that to describe Sophie's Choice in terms of post-adolescent comedy is akin to asking "Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?" For what lies beneath Sophie's story is of an entirely different magnitude than anything Stingo might experience firsthand. As he gets to know these individuals and catches glimpses of their traumas, Stingo also comes face to face with the existence of pure evil. We witness his struggle to grapple with the unthinkable, to explain the inexplicable, and to empathize with someone who has confronted moral dilemmas that most of us can scarcely fathom. Styron approaches this by frequently shifting the time period and narrative voice, at times having Stingo write as the naïve observer swept up in events, and at other times as the objective historian looking back years after the fact. This multiple perspective creates a moral prism through which all manner of issues are refracted: race and creed, the legacy of slavery, North and South, Jew and Gentile, rich and poor, prudery and sexual liberation, and the challenge to religious belief. If classified into a genre as I earlier mentioned, Sophie's Choice would stand as one of the most powerful treatments of its subject in international literature. It also remains one of the richest and most thought-provoking novels about American life and morality written in the postwar era.