Sophie's Choice

Rating:
Summary: A book for avid readers
Review: I knew before I began reading what the final 'choice' Sophie had to make was. I had seen some revealing clips of the film adaptation on the Charlie Rose show during an interview with Meryl Streep. So arriving at the climactic point of Sophie's Auschwitz story, I wasn't surprised, having already anticipated the reason for the title. But what I couldn't anticipate was the breadth of the novel's story, the details of Styron's descriptions, the allure of the three main characters, and the fullness with which I was thrown into the post-war setting and my inability to escape that world after I had finished the book. To say that this is a Holocaust novel would be entirely accurate, but the description would fail to capture the scope of the book. It takes place in New York, and is narrated by a sexually frustrated, aspiring writer from the south named Stingo. He meets Nathan, an American Jew obsessed with the Holocaust who sometimes acts out abusively, and Sophie, a beautiful Polish Auschwitz survivor who slowly reveals her past, and her painful relationship with Nathan, to our narrator who is secretly in love with her. But what keeps me thinking about the novel is not just the story, but how well Styron tells it. He brings in so many vivid images and descriptions that I could not help but feel that the characters were concrete and once existed, and what they went through was real, and the depth of their personalities attracted me in such a way that the pain I felt upon finishing the book had less to do with Sophie's personal tragedy which occurred at Auschwitz, but with the trio's tragedy after the war in New York. Because Styron's story isn't really about the Holocaust, but rather its aftermath. It is so affecting because you see the psychological damage inflicted on Sophie by her experience to the extent that her life afterwards would be so miserable. Her one small source of happiness is Nathan, who is himself suffering, unable to escape both his guilt and his madness. And Stingo, as much as he wants to help the two people he cares about most, is unable to do anything at all.

Rating:
Summary: One of my favorites
Review: My mom recommended this book to me (having only seen the movie herself), and I thought it was wonderful. Styron tells a great story and keeps the reader interested throughout. This is also one of the most moving Holocaust books I've read (I've read tons). I would recommend this for anyone looking for an interesting and involving read.

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: 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.

Rating:
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

Rating:
Summary: Evil and madness
Review: William Styron has written a profoundly moving and disturbing novel with 'Sophie's choice'. The story of Sophie, a beautiful Polish Catholic who survived Auschwitz and was left with no family, and Nathan, her schizophrenic American Jewish lover, as related by Stingo, a naive but sensitive 22 year-old Southerner wishing to be a writer, is, perhaps, one of the most harrowing stories one can manage to read. Styron evidently conducted a considerable amount of research on the Nazi occupation of Poland and the hideous dynamics of their concentration camps, and his synthesis through Sophie (whose name, etymologically, means knowledge) is convincing and compelling. But what makes 'Sophie's choice' go beyond a mere historical novel is the excellent way in which Styron weaves Sophie's story with those of Nathan and Stingo and the deep ruminations on the nature of evil and madness and their consequences. Although Styron sometimes gets long-winded, especially when he has Stingo ponder about sexual matters, the novel succeds in making us understand a sad historical event in more humane terms. Perhaps a creative university professor teaching World War II history would be wise enough to assign this novel to make students realize that history is not, as somebody once facetiously said, 'one damn fact after another'.