Book Review - Sophie's Choice by William Styron

Synopsis: First published in 1979, this complex and ambitious novel opens with Stingo, a young southerner, journeying north in 1947 to become a writer. It leads us into his intellectual and emotional entanglement with his neighbors in a Brooklyn rooming house: Nathan, a tortured, brilliant Jew, and his lover, Sophie, a beautiful Polish woman whose wrist bears the grim tattoo of a concentration camp...and whose past is strewn with death that she alone survived.

First Line: "In those days cheap apartments were almost impossible to find in Manhattan, so I had to move to Brooklyn."

Random Quote: "Never, never, she told me, would she ever forget this initial meal they had together, the sensuously concocted dinner which he fashioned from, of all humble things, calf's liver & leeks."

Review: I read this (sort of) once before, in 1985 after seeing the movie. I remember I was traveling on a plane from New Mexico (where I lived at the time) to Seattle (to visit family). I had the book on the plane & had been reading it, but having a hard time with it & when I left the plane I left the book without finishing it. Leaving a book behind is extremely unusual for me - I never go anywhere without a book & I just about always finish just about everyth

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ing. I decided that I just wasn't meant to read this book if I'd left it behind. I was 22. I had equal trouble with Lie Down in Darkness - just couldn't get through it. I loved his book on his own struggles with depression - Darkness Visible - I thought it was one of the truest pieces of writing about depression that I had ever read. I figured eventually I'd get back to his fiction.

I picked up Sophie's Choice again as part of a reading challenge - to read some American prize winning books & compare them. I'm glad I did. This one won the National Book Award. Styron can write & he can tell a story - painful though it may be. I loved the craft of this book, the interplay of language & the brick-by-brick-by-word-by-word deftness of his creations - Stingo, Sophie, & Nathan & long ago far away Brooklyn.

As much a meditation on his younger days as a fledgling writer as it is a Holocaust story, this novel is also a Southerner's rumination on what it means to be Southern, to be liberal, to have lived through the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis & to see similar horrors perpetrated in your home (see also, slavery & lynchings). There are aspects of this book that remind me very clearly of North Toward Home - Willie Morris' wonderful memoir about being a Southerner among Northern intellectuals. Styron beautifully captures Stingo's naivete & self-conscious youth as he struggles with his first novel.

Equally well-drawn are the doomed Nathan & Sophie - their mutual histories of madness & despair intertwined in fatal & beautiful ways. It is worth remembering that more than Europe's Jews were caught up in the Nazi insanity - Sophie's story is just one of many.

This is a difficult, painful & ultimately worthwhile novel. Read it - you won't regret it.

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