Sophie's Choice

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Summary: I didn't know what I was getting into - I promise!
Review: This is a romance novel between Stingo, Sophie, and Nathan. Sophie's choice is between Nathan and Stingo. Wait. That's not it at all. Since I had no idea what the book was about, I didn't know what the primary issue being addressed truly was. Fellow readers, the plot is the aftermath of a Polish woman who survived her residence in a German concentration camp during World War II. She tells her story in America to the narrator, Stingo, who is in love with her. Very interesting and powerful stuff. Not so fast. If this were all the novel was about, it would be pretty straightforward. We also must note Sophie's detrimental relationship with Nathan. "Detrimental" is a euphemism. Can someone please explain to me why Styron felt inclined to have Sophie tortured in both Germany AND America? What message was he trying to ram home? I admit that his scholarship provided irreplaceable insights, images, and facts concerning the occurrences inside and around the camps. But I found the devastating dynamics of Sophie's relationship with Nathan too difficult to swallow. Styron put too much on my plate, and I didn't ask for some of the portions he generously plopped down. In conclusion, if you are reading this book in the summer, try to listen to some cheerful music to raise your spirits. I recommend the Beatles' White Album. If you are reading this in the winter (the better season for such a novel), it should get you through those bitterly cold evenings while you imagine what Sophie goes through. Well Styron, you win. I don't think I'll ever forget this book. And you, my fellow readers, likely will not either.

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Summary: An American Masterpiece
Review: 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 Judgement Day, only morning, beautiful and fair

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Summary: I'm blown away . . .
Review: What a book! What a movie! How could anyone NOT like anything Styron wrote, especially this masterpiece? By far this is a landmark in American literature, a saga of enormous weight and merit, like Steinbeck's "East of Eden," McCrae's "Bark of the Dogwood," or Conroy's "Prince of Tides." Sophie's Choice packs a wallop you won't soon forget. Even if you know the story you'll still be blown away by the excellent dialogue, brilliant characters, great settings, and moving events that unfold--it all makes for great literature, great reading, and above all, an American masterpiece.

Also recommended: Prince of Tides, Bark of the Dogwood, and Empire Falls

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Summary: Delightful prose, heart-wrenching story
Review: One thing noteworthy about William Styron is his skill with the english language. He weaves together sentences and paragraphs that alone could convey the reader on a joyful voyage. But when you combine his beautiful prose with this sad tale, you get a near magnum opus. Having children myself, I felt the deepest sense of tragedy when Sophie had to make her choice. It stirred those tender feelings deep inside me, feelings that I thought had been perpetually dormant. Lastly, the novel was effective at teaching a westerner like me about the long-standing antagonism between the north and south, between rebel and yankee. Highly recommended book! If you read only one William Styron book, read this one for goodness sake.

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Summary: No wonder it has earned a National Award
Review: Sophie's choice: By William Styron.

Outstanding piece of literature. Somehow It makes me believe that a great portion of this accomplishment is not fiction at all, but a real life story with characters that get so much into the deepest inner self of the reader inciting him to not want to stop reading.

There are three aspects of this production extraordinarily remarkable:

Firstly, the use of great prose and vocabulary. Styron plays with words to conceive the greatest work of description I have read.

Secondly, all the details of the horrendous, not forgivable, indescribable, examples of crimes executed during the Holocaust. Specifically in Auschwitz, Birkenau concentration camps, with its crematory installations, and of the way some polish people acted, and so many of them also died, leads me to believe that 100% of the facts did occur as utterly wrong as Styron relates them. This seems no fiction but reality

And last but not least, Sophie, the beautiful, fair, polish woman that relates her story during those years. She relates her life intermittently positioning lies between true events all throughout this piece of literature.

And almost at the end relates how she is imminently condemned to take the most hideous choice of her life. The one that leads her to the most shaking end .

To closure my summary, I shouldn't fail to convey that the idiosyncrasies of the personalities are anything but conventional, and the narration, done by the young and naive writer Stingo, whose life seems to be a self-portrayal of Willian Styron himself.

No wonder it has earned a National Price Award.

Please anyone send me suggestions about other Titles as good as this.

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Summary: John Gardner compared it to Shakespeare
Review: One of my favorite novels, one, as the years go by, to which I inevitably return, lifting the volume (a hardcover first edition) idly from my shelf and leafing through its pages, is Sophie's Choice, by William Styron. I don't think it would be too egregious an exaggeration to say that the book changed my life - certainly it altered the way I look at writing and literature.

Sophie's Choice was my first awakening to the concept of style. The long, windswept passage, for which I may have developed an unhealthy predeliction; the vigorous attention to the right word - there is even a passage in the novel describing Stingo's, that is, the narrator's, almost masturbatory pleasure in words, pacing madly about his extravagantly pink apartment and chanting words aloud, struggling over whether to use "undoubtedly" or "indubitably"; the use of an innocent, fish-out-of-water, first-person narrator, viewing an exotic milieu completely afresh ("a place as strange as Brooklyn," says Stingo), who, by entering into another character's confidence, permits the author an omniscience he might not otherwise believably have been able to enjoy.

It is a long book, but I finished it quickly, reading it, largely on the strength of my father's not-ignorant recommendation as one of the two best books he'd read in the last ten years, whenever I could: at school, at home, walking, in the car, on the toilet, anywhere. There were parts I found a little tedious, a fact indicative, probably, of the mentality that results my generation's constant inundation with (admittedly very important) WWII information and literature and movies and etc. - not, of course, that these bits aren't equally well-done, interesting and moving - but I lived for the parts involving the relationship between Stingo, Nathan and Sophie. Nathan Shapiro is one of my favorite characters in literature, I think, and it helped to see him through Stingo's acutely perceptive, and endearingly ignorant - as ignorant as I must have felt, at that age - eyes.

The way Styron handles Nathan's lapses into madness - or, as the reader learns later, relapses into cocaine and drug-induced mania combined with a severe case, probably, of bipolar disorder, at a time when psychoanalytical jargon was very much in style (and very much disparaged by Styron through his characters, particularly Sophie) - is masterful: he can make Nathan impossibly generous and glamorous and and beautiful and charming and kind for long parts of the book, then include an unexpected outburst of cruelty, usually monstrous verbal abuse of Sophie, not to say of Stingo, whom he taunts for his Southern background and what Nathan assumes is a racist upbringing.

There is a quality of inevitability to the book that makes me think it might eventually have been written even if Styron had not beaten everyone to it.

Also recommended: Mysteries of Pittsburgh, by Michael Chabon

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Summary: Where is the story?
Review: 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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Summary: A Truly Great Novel
Review: 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 Hoss, 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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Summary: Chilling
Review: 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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Summary: Masterfully written story of a tragic life
Review: 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.