Oh, I can imagine that happening to Keneally. Daughters of Mars I thought was really in desperate need of editing. It just seemed to go on and on….. His research about Schindler involved multiple trips to interview the people who were rescued but he was helped enormously by one man who had built up a dossier already and could make the introductions for him.
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Skip to content March 31, kimbofo. Fiction — paperback; Vintage Classics; pages; Share this:. Like this: Like Loading Published by kimbofo. His research about Schindler involved multiple trips to interview the people who were rescued but he was helped enormously by one man who had built up a dossier already and could make the introductions for him Like Liked by 1 person.
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Follow Following. Reading Matters Join 4, other followers. Sign me up. Already have a WordPress. Log in now. Loading Comments Email Required Name Required Website. Post was not sent - check your email addresses! Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email. But maybe I could write it as a novel, you see, if I learned to write English good, and then I could make people understood how the Nazis made you do things you never believed you could I was so afraid!
They made me afraid of everything! Why don't I tell the truth about myself? Why don't I write it down in a book that I was a terrible coward, that I was a filthy collaboratrice that I done everything that was bad just to save myself? Birkenau: Those who do not have a why to live cannot bear any how.
Is it not so? He always required his customers to take the horse nearest the door or none at all. It came to be known as Hobson's choice, meaning what appears to be a free choice which offers no option at all.
That was Sophie's choice. Was it not so? Let us allow young Stingo to have the last word, shall we? This was a brave statement but innocently absurd. No one will ever understand Auschwitz. What I might have set down with more accuracy would have been: Someday I will write about Sophie's life Auschwitz itself remains inexplicable.
The most profound statement yet made about Auschwitz was not a statement at all, but a response. The query: "At Auschwitz, tell me, where was God? He was a finalist for the National Critics Circle Award. However, reviews were mixed.
Styron was criticized for having taken on a topic to huge to be taken on in any manner other than silence, ignoring earlier works in existence and widely recognized. A narrower criticism was based on Styron having selected a Polish Catholic as his central character as the Holocaust's purpose was deemed the extermination of the Jewish Race. Heinrich Himmler founded the Lebensborn project on December 12, , the same year the Nuremberg Laws outlawed intermarriage with Jews and others who were deemed inferior.
Himmler encouraged SS and Wermacht officers to have children with Aryan women. He believed Lebensborn children would grow up to lead a Nazi-Aryan nation. The program ran from Polish children were particular targets of the program with allegedly over , children stolen from their parents. She doubted that he ever did anything. Hoess is the only real character to appear in the pages of Sophie's Choice. He did serve as the commandant at Auscwitz.
He was a defendant at the Nuremberg Trials and sentenced to death. Now, the maturing Stingo builds his tribute. Puccini's Chrisantemi, the Chrysanthemums, an old piece but only recently rediscovered. Aaron Copland.
View all 53 comments. Jun 01, Dolors rated it it was amazing Recommends it for: Those not afraid of evil.
Shelves: read-in , best-ever , dost. Hers is tragic story mined with shame, fear and bewilderment over the aberrations perpetrated on her with no rational cause or logical explanation. Her sole crime: being at the wrong place at the wrong time. Her everlasting punishment: the unbearable loss impregnated with the odor of burning human flesh that chokes her faltering recollections of an irredeemable past that not even the possibility of a bright future can dissipate.
Nathan has chosen to make of collective calamity his personal crusade while prejudice runs ironically deep through his veins. So now love me, Sophie. Love me. Love me! Love life! With composed momentum and exuberant phrasing pregnant with vivid literary and classical music references Styron directs a dichotomous dialogue between the fragile lightness of harmony and the aberrant darkness of mass destruction, the purgative power of love and the menace of its delirious addiction, the flickering candle of hope and the smothering smell of death.
Is life a hideous symphony played by the grotesque absurdity of serendipitous horror or the result of conscientious choices made in the fetid sinkhole of the world of the living dead, where waves of piercing agony wash all the recesses of memory, coming and going with the rhythm of cathartic writing? How can those who survived the banality of evil endure the burden of the gift of life when so many perished amidst dehumanized barbarity?
Do individual choices matter in collective madness? When man is plunged into realms that transcend reason, sanity or faith and the very notion of existence becomes a ludicrous thought? When an unknown God turns his back on him and wipes out the flow of his love on all living things? Did Sophie ever have a real choice? View all 62 comments. There is truth and there are lies — and in between we walk tortuous paths of our lives. Perhaps I should say she indulged in certain evasions which at the time were necessary in order for her to retain her composure.
Or maybe her sanity. And to get to the truth one must peel off so many layers of lies. And somet There is truth and there are lies — and in between we walk tortuous paths of our lives. And sometimes it is a taxing toil. This was not judgment day — only morning. Morning: excellent and fair.
View all 5 comments. Jun 03, Andrew rated it it was ok Shelves: literature-modern. I stuck with it out of curiosity, not so much to find out what her choice was, but because this is supposedly an important American novel and I kept waiting for the "Aha! Unfortunately it was just way too long. I now know what it's like to suffer from too much foreshadowing.
It was so tiresome reading hint after ominous hint about what was going to happen. The narration was clumsy and over-explanatory. Do you really have to recap an event that you just nar I stuck with it out of curiosity, not so much to find out what her choice was, but because this is supposedly an important American novel and I kept waiting for the "Aha!
Do you really have to recap an event that you just narrated 50 pages anterior? Did Styron think the audience too dumb to remember the episode well enough to comprehend an explicit allusion or god forbid an oblique reference?
Do you really have to hammer home over and over again how frustrated he is to not be having sex, just to build up one of the last scenes? I'll grant that it might have been intentional to create a narrator so unsympathetic and annoying, but the result was irritation and a strong urge to quit the book completely. Another problem with the voice was Sophie's narrative about Auschwitz. There were several moments when you saw the quotes around the paragraphs, indicating she was talking, but it was grammatically perfect.
It was, as I already said, clumsy, and I can only suppose it was poor planning. Styron clearly wanted to eat his cake and have it too. There were some pretty passages mixed in.
Most of the good stuff revolved around the Auschwitz narrative and the observations it afforded Styron to make about human nature and the nature of hellish war. There were some good analogies, particularly the rats-in-a-barrel Jews vs. Of course, this reaffirms my opinion that it could have been a much better book by cutting pages. I'm just going to assume that most of the "staggering," and "masterful" touches to this work two adjectives employed in the praise section of the edition I read were over my head.
View 2 comments. I always tend to find these narrative devices kind of manipulative, distracting and most of the times unnecessary. But here, with this one, somehow the writing saved it all for me and I read those long flashbacks nearly as compulsively as the rest of it. Some imagery from this novel is going to stay with me possibly for the rest of my life. I know it. I know perfectly well the effects of good writing on my brain. Manhattan, Brooklyn, the ocean and the way it reflected the light.
The wind blowing from it; Its coolness. The sand, the dunes and the beers. Oh, the dunes And Sophie, of course. Always Sophie. Her stories, voice, pain, dreams, worst nightmares and lies. A beautifully written but slightly conflicting novel about lust and love, broken dreams, loss and the horrors of war. An extra half star just for Sophie. View all 21 comments. May 03, Matt rated it it was amazing Shelves: classic-novels , historical-fiction.
It was the subject of a relatively well-received movie starring Meryl Streep. It is not. It is wildly ambitious, chronically unfocused, irritating and ostentatious, precisely detailed, overly-written, soaring, gutter-dwelling, psychologically acute, digressionary, complex, utterly narcissistic, and an absolute masterpiece. This book is the best kind of sprawling mess there is.
This book made me laugh. It made me cringe. Part of it made me embarrassed for Styron or the editor. Other parts made me extremely envious. Classics are usually works of art you must wrestle with.
This is a classic. The story is set in post-war New York City beautifully wrought in It is narrated in the first person by a young, transplanted southerner who calls himself Stingo. It bears mentioning, I suppose, that Stingo is a thinly veiled version of Styron himself. Like Styron, Stingo came north from the Tidewater to pursue writerly ambitions. Both are terminated from that position by the same act of defiance. Stingo also — no surprises here — is fascinated by Nat Turner, and eventually writes a novel about him.
Stingo — though not ever, I assume, Styron — meets two remarkable people while staying at a NYC boarding house. They are Nathan, a young, brilliant Jewish man who works at Pfizer; and Sophie, a Polish woman who survived the camp at Auschwitz. From the start, Stingo is both intensely attracted to the couple especially Sophie and repelled by the violent tumultuousness they openly display. Living beneath them, he hears them making love and fighting, both with passionate intensity.
Very shortly, he becomes obsessed with them. This book is a meander more than anything, equal parts frustrating and breathtaking. Early on, for instance, Stingo takes a fair amount of time to describe to us the publishing job — reading manuscripts and writing summaries — that he is shortly to lose. What do these pages have to do with anything? Absolutely nothing. It goes where it wants, when it wants.
He is a navel gazer of the first order. There are dueling tragedies at play in this novel. First, the tragedy of the Holocaust, as symbolized by Sophie and Nathan. All tragedy is local, I suppose. See, e. Many times while reading I actually paused to ponder: did he really just do that? Styron does make any effort to partition of the all-time deadly-serious Auschwitz scenes from the Stingo-is-sexually-frustrated scenes. The passage of time allows for human tragedy to become literary drama.
The Holocaust has not been immune to this. Even so, the friction between the fictional and real-life elements that Styron mixes is so jarring that it can uncomfortably draw attention to itself. There are two incredible, lengthy set pieces within Auschwitz, one of which includes a razor-intense encounter with Commandant Rudolf Hoess. There is also a marathon sex scene that goes on for three pages. I was conflicted while reading it.
Page to page, my forbearance towards Styron spiked and dipped. When I put the book down, though, it didn't leave me right away. This is a book that resonates.
It is mad and loopy; it is powerful and passionate. It is the kind of book that I want to read again for the first time.
Jul 01, Petra is looking forward to getting off the rock rated it did not like it Shelves: fiction , books-i-really-loathed. One of those books everyone else loved and I loathed. I thought the book was pointless and overwrought, rather like Meryl Streep's acting in the film of the same name. View all 9 comments.
Jun 28, K. Shelves: race , , saddest , national , drama , core , time It was good that I missed the Oscar-nominated movie adaptation of this book when it was shown in My curiosity to find out what exactly was the meaning of the "choice" in the title, kept me leafing through the pages until it was revealed towards the end.
There are actually two. Sophie, the beautiful Polish non-Nazi Holocaust survivor has to choose who to end up with between her two lovers, the Jewish Nathan Landau who is a crazy junkie but who brought her to America and the struggling Ame It was good that I missed the Oscar-nominated movie adaptation of this book when it was shown in Sophie, the beautiful Polish non-Nazi Holocaust survivor has to choose who to end up with between her two lovers, the Jewish Nathan Landau who is a crazy junkie but who brought her to America and the struggling American, Stingo who is also the narrator of the story.
The other Sophie's choice should be 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: view spoiler [ Sophie had to choose who between her son and daughter should go to the concentration camp and who should die by gassing.
She choose her son to survive and her daughter to die. Burn in hell, you Nazis. This is my first Styron and I am impressed. His prose is not really exceptional but it is very readable. He has just the tendency to be overly melodramatic like Pat Conroy's The Prince of Tides but at least his characters are multi-dimensional.
There are only 3 main characters in this book but I could almost feel them rising up from the pages of this book. There are no clear heroes and villains among them. Styron just presented them as they are and so the first choice - who is the better man - should have been very hard for Sophie.
In the end, I thought that her decision is unwise but having it the other way around would not result to the same impact that Styron probably wanted his readers to feel. My favorite character is Sophie and her best part is in the scene when she told 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 then he totally transformed her afterwards by showing what she has to endure in living with Nathan and in the end, revealing what she had to go through in order to come in the US and fleeing her war-torn country, Poland. The theme is racism in all fronts: blunt vs subtle, past vs present, external vs. Blunt, past and external is the Holocaust that happened in Europe.
Subtle, present, internal are the many forms of racial discrimination that are still happening, in the US and even in other countries, even here in the Philippines. My only little complaint is the too much of use of F word and too much sex scenes that they could muddle the meaning of the story because sometimes I felt I was reading an erotica. I thought that Styron went a little overboard on these.
Otherwise, it is a story with a strong message, heart-wrenching plot, well-developed characters and shocking ending that would be enough reason for you to continue reading. This is a long page read but it is definitely worth your time. He is so good I can't wait to have a second serving.
View all 15 comments. Feb 03, Alex rated it it was amazing Recommends it for: anyone who thinks they are safe. Shelves: new-york-literary-biography , unreliable-narrators , , music , smut , hot-sex. Styron gets knocked for two reasons. The first is that he's an appropriater: in his Pulitzer-winning Confessions of Nat Turner, he appropriated the famous slave revolutionary's story, and here he's taken the Holocaust.
As he's neither black nor Jewish, some black and Jewish people are like wtf are you doing with my history. The second knock is that he writes clear and exciting prose with a lot of fancy words, leading Martin Amis to call him a "thesaurus of florid commonplaces. Stingo is about to write a novel about Nat Turner, so it's not a stretch to call him a stand-in for Styron. James Baldwin, a friend and defender, said that "He writes out of reasons similar to mine - about something that hurt him and frightened him.
He's shaken by the reality of it. Stingo figures out exactly what he was doing on the morning that Sophie arrived at Auschwitz: eating a banana on a beautiful day in North Carolina. This is his point, repeated often: at any given moment, while you're living your mundane life, someone in the world is capable of the deepest evil. American slavery looms over the story. Styron would like us to remember that we're sitting around in a country built on genocide, acting all horrified about what Nazis did.
Stingo is supported in part by a treasure found in an ancestor's basement; the treasure is the proceeds from the sale of a slave. The third character in the book is Nathan, Sophie's lover, and he embodies this human schizophrenia literally.
He's unstable: often charming, occasionally careening into violent madness. In the end, view spoiler [Sophie commits suicide with Nathan. What was happening that morning as Sophie, our destroyed heroine, arrived at Auschwitz was the deepest evil Styron can think of.
You probably know what the choice was, right? I'd never read the book or seen the movie but I've been using it as a joke for years: "Should we get burritos or fried chicken for lunch? I've rarely been so crushed by a novel. Styron is less interested in Sophie's choice than in the fact that she was forced to make it.
Here's the worst thing in the world, he says. Styron didn't make the choice up; he got it from Hannah Arendt, who says she got it from Camus. But could it happen? Of course it could; if we can't prove this exact story, we have ample proof of stories like it. Who could do it? Could you do it? Could someone be doing it right now? Styron believes that evil can happen anywhere, any time, to anyone. It could be happening now, as you read this review.
Maybe you're eating a banana. You are not intrinsically better than slaveowners or Nazis. You're lucky that as yet you haven't had to decide whether to resist or submit.
He asks: The query: "At Auschwitz, tell me, where was God? View all 8 comments. May 13, Cheryl rated it it was amazing Shelves: fiction , the-psyche , mesmerizing , war-stories , library-books. Confessional monologues to serve as counter narratives. Flashbacks from an American boarding house to Auschwitz. An intriguing love triangle. Secrets and lies unfolding with each new chapter. Sex, written with meticulousness.
This is how Styron gets you to stick with this intricately woven and stylistically stupendous novel. For synchronous with the stunning effect she made on my eyes as she stood there arrested in the doorway--blinking at the gloom, her flaxen hair drenched in the evening gol Confessional monologues to serve as counter narratives.
For synchronous with the stunning effect she made on my eyes as she stood there arrested in the doorway--blinking at the gloom, her flaxen hair drenched in the evening gold--I listened to myself give a thin but quite audible and breathless half-hiccup.
I was still moronically in love with her. Madness redefined. Psychosexual drama. The trauma experienced by a Polish woman at Auschwitz, the ideological dilemmas a Southerner-turned-New Yorker and writer must confront, the double life an intellectual Northerner must live, are all compiled to highlight the psychological feat of this novel.
But I will say this. Even with the angst and stupidity and trauma and depression and anxiety and ideology and drunken stupor and disdain of life and craft and art, each character seems to grow. With each turn of the page, something new develops, some story unwinds, some secret is revealed.
This is what I liked most about this book—even with the sad ending. There is something neurotic, melancholic and strangely pleasing about this novel—even with its gilded prose and festooned paragraphs that at first strikes you as a writer trying too hard.
Yes, here, tremendous effort was put forth to write an ambitious novel. Here, the effort was successful. Now I must see the movie… View all 31 comments.
But this Holocaust victim, tattooed on her hand, in her heart and soul, Auschwitz's purgatory, is hopelessly in a nondetachable love, lust, anguish, masochistic, and redeeming relationship with a Northern Jew. And this prejudiced yet genius of a charmer, suffers from fatal capricious fits. Oh and also, being a 22 year old hapless virgin, he is quite horny, plus there's a lot of heart-wrenching stuff from the holocaust which we all have heard about.
All of this might sound like an avaricious formula of a super hit plot from Styron, thus finding in it a large section of haters which, quite frankly and obviously, misses the complete picture.
Because really, there's a lot more and through this wanting review, I attempt to venture into some of that. After turning the last page of this book, like many others, I too was left with an emptiness, but the strange thing about it was that I didn't feel like filling it with anything.
Especially hope, the hypocritical, stalker of a wily worm hope which creeps in like a disguised devil to fill you up with a sense of redemption, holding in abeyance the banal devil this life is. So, inevitably when the gruesome reality strikes, destroying all hope , you find yourself stranded and deserted, because with all your might you were holding onto this faith, but now you've lost it, only to find it creeping in again.
Not all of us have to face such ordeal with life, but Sophie had to. Being a survivor of one of the darkest chapters in the history of mankind, Auschwitz , there are some traits which we would all expect in her: Anxiety, paranoia, inferiority complex, melancholy, apathy, they are all there, but there's love too.
Mad, unreasonable love for her savior Nathan , who loves her the same and claims her to be his own. But, the humbug stability that Sophie yearns for, is never to be found. You know why? Because of hope , that someday everything will be alright knowing in her heart that that's not possible, rendering herself ever on the verge of ending her perdurable life, which seemed so irrelevant, precarious, merciless. Perhaps that at least. A piece of human being but yes, a human being.
We really need to understand that it's only humans who are capable of such atrocities and it's only humans who can endure them. One of the things I particularly liked about this book is the first person narrative of the amatuer 22 year old Stingo , because perhaps the facts that he hadn't seen much of this brute world, had carried the guilt of his ancestral slavery, had found first real friends in Sophie and Nathan, altogether gave an indispensable fresh voice to this tragic tale.
Of course, the credit goes to the brilliance of William Styron. In the last few pages, Styron reveals the choice that Sophie had to make and live with. The choice that drives her remaining life with unendurable guilt because she really couldn't choose. But after all she did choose: to breathe, to salvage, to hope that someday the meaning of it all will reveal itself and she will "understand". While I'm pretty sure, I'm never going to meet people like Sophie, Nathan, or Stingo, but having known them in these last few days, they will forever be the three unforgettable strangers I almost "understood".
View all 19 comments. Oct 26, Elise rated it liked it. I finally finished it, yes all pages, and my reaction to "Sophie's Choice" is mixed. I spent years urged by friends to read this book, but I was afraid of what I would find in its pages, especially being a mom. It turns out my fears were completely unfounded.
This book is not at all what I thought it would be--a moving story of one woman's time at Auschwitz and the awful things she endures there as a mother. At first, I found the young something, Stingo, annoying because of his obsession with trying to get laid. But then, after I started to get further into the novel, I became grateful for the comic relief that his perspective offered.
However, it was also painfully obvious that Stingo was indeed William Styron, so the perspective was at times overly self-indulgent and out of place. That said, I am well aware that Stingo is here to represent the naive American juxtaposed with the worldly wise and world weary European perspective of Sophie a Polish Catholic , and that Stingo brings with him the American South's dark chapter of the history of slavery to parallel the Holocaust.
But frankly, as one more than familiar with these themes, one who specializes in American literature, did Styron really have to be so redundant about it? This book was screaming for a good editor to lop off at least pages from it's heft, most of which didn't add to the narrative, especially the parts that read like Stingo's dissertation, secondary sources about the Holocaust and all.
The other problem I have with this narrative is characterization, especially the characters of both Sophie and Nathan. There is so much missing from Sophie's characterization maybe because she is viewed through the eyes of horny Stingo , and it keeps me from being fully emotionally connected to her throughout the narrative, and this for me is the novel's major shortcoming.
And frankly, I just despised Nathan. I know Sophie is a masochistic victim who lived through some serious horrors. I know she made some choices she will never forgive herself for in the past, and so Nathan is the punishment she has inflicted on herself.
But what the hell is Nathan's problem besides the ones I won't mention here because I believe spoilers have no place in a book review? He is an American born Jew, born into wealth and privilege, enough wealth that he can actually help himself to get better.
Some of the scenes between Sophie and Nathan were more disturbing and horrific than the ones that took place at Auschwitz. Is that really what Styron hoped to accomplish? This story is as much about lies as it is about choices, lies that we hide behind to protect ourselves. So what happens when we confess the truth? That is a question worth thinking about. In spite of the fact that this book is very well written with regard to Styron's use of language and the rhythm of his prose thus, the 3 star rating , there was just too much hype preceding the book.
Likewise, there was way too much build up in the book itself regarding the nature of Sophie's actual "choice" too. Then when he finally gets there, Styron glosses over it, and that was the one place I would have liked him to linger.
That detracted from the emotional effect of it, at least for this reader. Now I look forward to seeing the film. Hopefully, it cleaned up some of Styron's messes. May 15, Erika rated it did not like it. Well, I finished it. And I despised every moment of it, from the writing to the characters.
Maybe I just don't understand or appreciate a writing style such as Styron's, but I just found it incredibly tedious and tiresome to wade through all of Stingo's incessant and lust-fueled rambling. I hated him and in turn ended up absolutely hating Sophie and Nathan. When you reach the climatic point in the novel and you don't feel even the slightest twinge of anything other than, thank god this means i Well, I finished it.
When you reach the climatic point in the novel and you don't feel even the slightest twinge of anything other than, thank god this means it is almost over, then you know that you should just call it a day and admit failure. So, yes. Sophie's Choice. Huge, gigantic and miserable no go for me.
By the time I learned the "true" story and the big reveal I just didn't care anymore. It is horrible that this is based on millions of true stories but this particular story could have been more succinct. View all 4 comments. Mar 24, William2 rated it it was amazing Shelves: ce , us , genocide , fiction. I've read it twice, maybe three times. I hope to read it again someday. This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.
If a novel leaves an indelible memory and evokes a deep and expansive personal response, I count it as a great book. When I was in high school we talked a great deal about the holocaust, I hope they still do. 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 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.
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. The human psyche is vulnerable to fear which is all too easily channeled to hatred and can, sadly, erupt in genocide. It saddens me, so when I finished this book last week it left me in something of a foreboding gloom. It brings to life in excruciating, sometimes excessively; detail what happened in Poland, Germany and America during and just after the Second World War.
He is, essentially, Stingo: A southern rube moved to the big city, somewhat smug and conceited about his own southern history, getting a rude awaking to the real world of jews, holocaust survivors, and how hatred is universal and intertwined. At over 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 s , actual people in Auschwitz and Treblinka and Birkenau.
Some interludes stretched the limits of credulity, but for me this was a minor flaw against a rich, majestic story. 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. I actually think I diagnosed his conditions independent of the authors this was published in , but I suspect he was writing it for at least a decade. 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 Styron himself wrote such a book — this to me was starkly autobiographical.
Stingo tells the story many years hence, so the plotline is him telling it from his sometimes directly quoted journals from 2 decades earlier. Some might complain that this jumping around is disjointed — but it worked for me. The movie was just so exceptional. But the movie is tighter, exceptional, and more focused on the excellent drama. In fact I ordered it from Netflix and the disc ready to be queued up now — being a cold rainy Saturday in Missouri, and my wife and I with some time on our hand.
I wonder if it will evoke 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 yes, it is that good. Aug 13, Dan rated it it was amazing Shelves: national-book-award-fiction , 6-star-fiction-books. Alright I am very late to the party in reading this classic. There are quite literally hundreds of lines that were perfectly rendered. View all 3 comments. Obviously, one star is a bit dramatic.
I didn't like this book but it was beautifully written--Styron is no slouch with words--and the characters and situation were vividly drawn. The "choice" Sophie had to make was a hellish one and unlike some reviewers here, I was deeply affected and I thought it explained a lot about her character. By contrast the lives and issues of Stingo and Nathan seem thin and pathetic. Which they were. Which was the problem. A writer once said I think it was Vonnegut Obviously, one star is a bit dramatic.
A writer once said I think it was Vonnegut give your readers at least one character to root for. I couldn't root for any of the three main characters.
Nathan was mentally ill, Stingo was insufferably self-absorbed. Even poor Sophie, who was a brilliantly-realized character was so without fight or self-respect by the time we meet her, that Stingo's banal lust for her bordered on necrophilia. I don't know. Perhaps in the context of post-War America and the self-hate citizens must have felt Styron was suffering from manic-depression at the time he wrote it.
I think that accounts for a great deal. I rarely throw books across the room. I threw this one. For a story premise that's catchy and original, this is one Dreck of an execution, as bad as to induce anger at encountering this poor handling of a serious theme.
As this is a classic novel, surely there's hundreds of reviews better and more articulate than mine, so I'll only list my main grievances, and do so as succintly as possible: Prose : Frankly, this was one of the most pedantic and overwritten proses I've ever found; so pretentious and wordy it makes it difficult to concentrate on the plot For a story premise that's catchy and original, this is one Dreck of an execution, as bad as to induce anger at encountering this poor handling of a serious theme.
As this is a classic novel, surely there's hundreds of reviews better and more articulate than mine, so I'll only list my main grievances, and do so as succintly as possible: Prose : Frankly, this was one of the most pedantic and overwritten proses I've ever found; so pretentious and wordy it makes it difficult to concentrate on the plot. If there's a simple, clear and perfectly lovely way to say something, you can bet Styron will twist it to sound as grand and preciosist as he can.
If there's a common and well-known term for something, you can be sure Styron will find a dozen synonyms to use and abuse so he can repeat the same things with different words, the more syllabes it has and the rarer it is in common usage, the better.
Being fair, there's a small chance that this is deliberate on the author's part, because the protagonist, Stingo, is an aspiring writer with a wince-inducing case of literary snobbery and an even worse case of needing to prove his intellectual worth and superiority.
Somehow, I doubt it's just a literary device. I'm sure it's an authorial trait, and that Stingo is just a barely-fictionalised Styron goes to reinforce my suspicion. Dialogue : Melodramatic, in parts long-winded to an unnatural extent, and suffering from the same excess of pretentiousness as the prose.
It would have been credible if only Stingo were the one to speak in such a manner. Story : If you thought the title Sophie's Choice was any indication of the contents, then you were misled like probably everyone. This isn't the story of a Polish concentration camp survivor called Sophie who was subjected to a diabolically cruel mind-game while at Auschwitz, like it would be logical to assume from the cover.
I can't even begin to enumerate the ways in which this is such a stupid structure to tell a story like that. Stingo is the only voice in the novel, his POV is the only one we get, and his own ideas, his own feelings and needs are what overwhelmingly colour the narration. Sophie, whose story is supposed to be the driving plot point, is merely an object, a device to allow Stingo and by extension William Styron to pontificate on a myriad topics he cannot possibly know.
Which is another huge issue, because although Stingo starts out stating he's going to tell Sophie's story to explore the dangers and threats of human evil, in the end he's run over by his lust for this woman and so enthralled by her and her toxic and abusive relationship with Nathan to bother to really go in-depth into any topic.
All those lofty and grand themes he wants to explore are just perfunctorily noted and mentioned in passing, and instead we're subjected to long, detailed and very in-depth explorations of the joys of coitus and the sexual frustration and lust that rule his life. To make things even more poorly handled and lacking in credibility, when Sophie does tell him the tale of her time in Auschwitz, which she tells in spaced and fragmented ways over a period of time, Stingo that is, Styron doesn't allow her to have her own voice and pass on her story unmolested.
Stingo has to serve as a filter for her, interjecting all the time to add his own commentary and to tell things like feelings, thought processes and body-awareness that he has absolutely NO WAY of knowing. Because he narrates like he's in Sophie's head, thinking her thoughts and feeling her emotions!
How exactly does that ring credible? Styron could've quite easily given Sophie her own POV. It's no wonder accusations of appropriation are thrown his way, and I'd not say it's because he's a WASP writing about the Shoah, for I maintain any writer has the right to write about topics that aren't his own country, or race, or gender. That's the beauty of literature. The problem is that he's taken Sophie to be a mere mouthpiece for his ideology and his thoughts.
No, scratch that, she's not even a mouthpiece; that'd be Stingo, she's merely a device to allow the mouthpiece to express his thoughts, and not a character. Another thing that I found distracting was the author's tendency to use sexuality for shock. And I'm not speaking of Stingo specifically, as for him being oversexed is practically how he's been conceived by the writer.
I'm thinking of Sophie, and how in her parts it's used as a shock tactic outside of her relationship with Nathan where it does make sense why she's like she is , both consensual and non-consensual, and with both genders. Wrap-Up : By the time Sophie's "choice" is revealed in the penultimate chapter, interest has waned so much it's hardly shocking. Or not shocking at all, if you were able to guess from the clues spread all over the novel since the beginning. That's another flaw: the author has stretched the story of Sophie's hard choice for too long, dropping the breadcrumbs little by little as he wrote only to find when he's finally arrived to destination that he no longer has any loaf of bread.
Styron just squanders the potential emotional impact by excessive delay. And on top of it, when he finally reveals what Sophie's choice was about, he further diminishes its impact with two details: one, that the choice was forced on Sophie not by the person that the build-up to the reveal would've indicated was the most logical suspect to do precisely that to her but by another I'm going to put inside spoiler brackets.
In English, Dr Someone from Nobody. Why invent a foolish name and not use the name of any of the real SS doctors? Why not Dr Mengele? Or Dr Wunsch? The names of the Auschwitz doctors are no secret, but instead this author thinks to call the physician Dr Somebody from Nobody is witty. It's just unjustifiable to me, even if the purpose was to prove Stingo's point that evil is banal and anonymous. And to crown this mess, right after Sophie reveals her soul-crushing secret, she's barely given a chance to elaborate on her thoughts and reactions.
Instead, Stingo takes over and pontificates. It's really good, and by itself would've convinced me to rate this book higher, but the negatives just outweighted the originality and interest in the story. Oct 28, Moses Kilolo rated it it was amazing. And the way everything that went down in Auschwitz is narrated here is very heartbreaking, just as is the relationship between Nathan and Sophie.
But the question that resounds, as Styron asks, is: At Auschwitz, tell me, where was God. But again comes Styron's response; At Auschwitz, where was man? This is a book that provides a heartfelt account of one of histories darkest era, as well as what such happening do to people, even after so many years. Such Damage, I think, at times, if not most, or always, may as well be permanent.
Possibly, if Sophie survived it, she did not survive the damage caused, the loss suffered, the pain in the memory, of Jan, of Eva, of what could have been and never will Aug 31, Nathan Oates rated it it was amazing Recommends it for: Everyone on earth.
I read this book at Amy's prompting and found it one of the most complex reading experiences of my life. At times, I hated this book: the elaborate, excessive prose style, the occasional and hideous homophobia not excusable by it's placement in the consciousness of the character, in my opinion , the adolescent attitude toward women and sex again, not excusable and yet, despite all these moments of frustration, this is an immense and beautiful and even great novel.
The writing about the holoca I read this book at Amy's prompting and found it one of the most complex reading experiences of my life. The writing about the holocaust is riveting, horrifying and heartbreaking I felt like vomitting from horror once or twice, felt my stomach clenching many times. It is extremely rare to find a book that manages to evoke such a complex of emotions and responses over the course of pages, and this is the book's triumph: even as it is about violence, despair, terror, madness and death, it contains more life, more beauty, more love and emotion than almost any book I have ever read.
All it's flaws and there are many merely add to the complexity of the characters, the style, the subject. Contemporary writers should look to this book for evidence of the capacities of the novel to engage with life in all its muddled, vicious evil and find a way to make beauty from it.
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