Sophie's Choice

Rating:
Summary: Incomprehensible evil
Review: William Styron's Sophie's Choice presents the most awful choice a parent could ever make. Why that choice had to be made, and why Stingo, the man relating the story, cannot forget Sophie, is the driving force behind this uncompromising and fateful story. The idea will give you pause even before you have read the novel, and the memory of the choice will make you sad for as long as you remember this book.

Rating:
Summary: A Voyage of Discovery
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: An all-time favorite
Review: This book is in my top twenty of all time, and I am a very, very picky reader. Styron manages to create a world that, while unbearably sad, draws you in and doesn't let you go. His prose is beautiful and his characters unforgettable. This book is a classic.

Rating:
Summary: Should be mandatory reading ... for everyone
Review: I cannot, of course, do justice to the unspeakable horrors of the holocaust here - and that's why William Styron's 'Sophie's Choice' will stay with me forever. He drew me, an ignorant outsider who wasn't even born during the period he recreates, into a world I would have remained ignorant of, had it not been for his exceptionally powerful imangination and literary genius.

Quite simply, 'Sophie's Choice' should be read by everyone. I believe educating our generation about evil is the single best way of preventing a recurrence. Through the sheer powers of his literary mind, Styron manages to educate us all about pure evil - using his heartbreakingingly memorable mouthpiece Sophie as his vehicle.

Like many readers of this novel, the magical Meryl Streep was my motivation for turning to the fiction. Her performance in the film was the finest I will ever see. As with all good adaptations however, the film really is only a metaphor for a multi layered and complex novel, which deserves to be read by everyone. I cannot, however, imagine an actress more perfect than Meryl Streep to play Sophie. She simply embodied the character.

Yes, the novel is shocking (in parts), it is also explicit, it is incredibly moving, it can be very witty, and very dark - and it is also profund and powerful. Don't let prudery regarding the sexual content put you off this book - I would urge anyone and everyone to read it, but especially younger people. We all should be made to understand the holocaust, and through the powers of his amazing literary genius, Styron illuminates one of the twentieth century's most apalling attrocities.

Rating:
Summary: An extraordinary story
Review: William Styron's "Sophie's Choice" has to stand as one of the 20th century's great American novels. Based very loosely on his own experiences in the late 1940s in New York, Styron makes himself into a writer called Stingo who moves into a boarding house in Brooklyn, where he meets a Polish emigré named Sophie and her dangerously unpredictable lover, Nathan. With great delicacy and restraint, Styron traces the evolution of the friendship and love that entangles these three and which has stunning consequences.

For those who have only seen the 1985 movie starring Meryl Streep (and for which she deservedly won the Best Actress Oscar), do yourself a favor and read the book. The movie was indeed wonderful, but the book is so much richer and more detailed and Styron's mastery of this compelling narrative is marvelous to behold. For those who have NOT seen the film, you will assume that "Sophie's Choice" has to do with Nathan and Stingo. Heartbreakingly, it both does and does not.

Styron has an incredible gift for injecting humor into dark situations. He makes Stingo an inordinately horny, frustrated, pained, wise-cracking man in his early 20s--Stingo leaps off the pages as fully formed and utterly human. Nathan too, in a much different way, is three-dimensional and fiery with life. Sophie is rendered in more delicate tones than the two men, which makes the final chapters of the book all the more powerful. We see what she has withstood and what she has given up and it is inescapably heartbreaking.

The book's ending is utterly right and the inexorable product of all that has gone before it. Styron has taken an enormously complex panoply of subjects--young manhood, post-WWII New York, mental illness, obsession, guilt, and more--and structured them into one of the most un-put-downable novels you will ever read.

Rating:
Summary: Wonderful piece of literature
Review: 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

Rating:
Summary: A Perfect Reading Experience
Review: One of the most dozen or so perfect reading experiences you will have.

Finished it in 5 days.

Talk about unputdownable.

Five stars for the exquisite language.

Five stars for the explosively funny sex -- or lack of it. As brilliant as anything Roth has done.

Five stars for the rendering of Auschwitz and the Nazi mind.

Five stars for pacing and characterization.

Five stars for the hilarious account of life at McGraw-Hill.
(How on earth some readers find the opening "weird" is beyond me.)

And five stars for making Sophie Catholic -- a brilliant choice that throws the Nazi's bestial mania into sharp relief: their evil knew no bounds.

You wish they'd make this book compulsory reading in schools.

(One school library in America tried to ban it.)

But they won't. (Thanks to our sex-denying, death-denying culture.)

Pass this book onto your children. God bless you William Styron.

This is a perfect book.

Rating:
Summary: A masterpiece for the ages
Review: I would be hard pressed to come up with any other novel of any time or subject matter that I so admire ,that so fully engaged me, devastated me and still left me exuberant about the breath of Styron's talent and the power of raw human emotion. It is that rare gem that has a sweeping narrative, many crucial subject matters( the Holocaust, its aftermath, the capacity for human suffering and sacrifice and the many faces of madness and desperation) and clearly drawn main characters as well as an unforgettable" supporting cast". It brings to bear so many different worlds in just a short span of years and a poignant encounter on the beach of Coney Island between the world weary Old World Sophie and the young, self-absorbed, quintessentially American Leslie who considers her every whim and orgasm the nucleus of the universe. The language is very lush, graphic and slightly melodramatic but so beautiful one gets caught up and doesn't wish it a word shorter. Styron doesn't skim on the edges of literature or human nature; he dips in full bore and paints a world that is part Hieronymus Bosch, part Freud and part the fraility of a child's first daubs. In the end we have two defeated lovers drowned in sorrow, booze, wit, wickedness and ash, sort of like pillars of non-conformity and emoting,who yearn for their graves with a theatrical sorrow as if it were a childhood signal to go home.

Rating:
Summary: coming-of-age melodrama becomes stirring work of art
Review: William Styron is a beautiful writer. The langauge of this book is diverse, an expanding pool of currents and dips and waves that all gets straight to the point with a rattling fierceness that draws you down the shimmering wave of the barren, heartless truth: It's a great novel.

History through the voice of a naive young Southerner in the Jewish part of post WWII Brooklyn and he's there to write the great American novel. He sees and meets the people around him, all strange and overly chatty and everything seems somehow dipped with the darkness of secrets being told. It doesn't matter what the people talk about: death, the holocost, religion, sex, general annopyances and hatred--everything comes down to the horrifying center of existence. Or at least that's what our narrator is trying to learn to believe.

Then there's Sophie, the non-Jewish Pole who suffered horrendously in a concentration camp, pulled from her life of wealth, love and family (which she later found out was more of a plot than a romance) and forced into the life of people she'd been told were sub-human. She holds the key dreadful secret our narrator wishes to discover and isn't truly one for talking about her past.

Then there's Nathan, a rich, crazy, angry young American Jew. He missed the war and stayed at home growing bitter, defiant and resentful of not experiencing the trauma of people the wants to believe are his breathren. He's grown radically smart and blathers on with drug-induced enthusiasm about triumphs he has solved in his head and hasn't yet gotten around to committing to righting the actual wrongs. He blames Sophie, the non-Jew and his lover, for hijacking an experience rightfully belonging to himself. He blames the narrator for being from the South and therefore having a geographical connection to more forms of bigotry and oppression (regardless of his uncertain but staunch and perhaps intentionally cliched left-wing pronouncements from time to time). He blames other Jews for not being as militant as himself, the ostricized, banished Jew who can only feed off of other people's tragedies.

Take this mix and wrap it around a sometimes ridiculous soap-opera romantic entanglement and the result is Sophie's Choice.

Enjoy.

Rating:
Summary: Extraordinarily Good on Many Levels
Review: Sophie's Choice almost lost me in the first thirty pages or so, but thank goodness I hung in there. A tragic yet surprisingly non-depressing story (at times humorous, at times sad, but always compelling and riviting) of three people, Stingo (the narrator, a Southern youth yearning to be a writer living in the utterly strange world of New York), Nathan (Sophie's lover, brilliant, fascinating, and troubled) and of course Sophie, the beautiful Polish Auschwitz survivor who utterly captivates Stingo's imagination, who become, as Stingo quotes Sophie, "the closest of friends." And the friendship this lonely Southern young man develops with these two exotic (to him) individuals is at the heart of this compelling novel. Styron's story actually weaves together two stories: that of Stingo's journey of self-discovery "in a place as strange as Brooklyn" and that of Sophie, a "bruised and battered child[ren] of the earth," whose gently playful personality stuggles to survive her guilt about her past and her passionate but difficult and sometimes shocking relationship with Nathan. Styron accomplishes the difficult task of making the reader appreciate, understand, and even admire the character of Nathan by telling his story through Stingo's eyes, so despite Nathan's flaws, and indeed Sophie's as well, the love Stingo feels for them both is believable and moving. The gradually revealed tale of the concentration camp is grim and realistic, and Sophie's telling of it illuminates the source of the guilt which is destroying her : her choice, or choices--for there are many choices, although the one referenced in the title stands starkly, horrifying alone. By the end of the book, I loved Stingo, Nathan, and Sophie and while I did not exactly foresee the ending, afterward its inevitability...even its rightness...convinced me that this book was lovingly crafted by Styron. The movie, for which Meryl Streep deservedly won an Oscar, is a honorable attempt to be true to the heart and soul of this story, but only reading it allows one to experience its true power. Don't be discouraged if the first pages don't grab you; your patience will be rewarded with a gem of a book, a genuine work of literature, and something approaching, if not actually achieving, greatness.