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Sophie's Choice

4.14 of 5 stars 4.14 · rating details · 34,541 ratings · 1,156 reviews

"[One morning] in the early spring, I woke up with the remembrance of a girl I'd once known, Sophie. It was a very vivid half-dream, half-revelation, and all of a sudden I realized that hers was a story I had to tell." That very day, William Styron began writing the first chapter of Sophie's Choice.

First published in 1979, this complex and ambitious novel opens with Stingo

...more "[One morning] in the early spring, I woke up with the remembrance of a girl I'd once known, Sophie. It was a very vivid half-dream, half-revelation, and all of a sudden I realized that hers was a story I had to tell." That very day, William Styron began writing the first chapter of Sophie's Choice.

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.

"Sophie's Choice is a passionate, courageous book...a philosophical novel on the most important subject of the twentieth century," said novelist and critic John Gardner in The New York Times Book Review. "One of the reasons Styron succeeds so well in Sophie's Choice is that, like Shakespeare (I think the comparison is not too grand), Styron knows how to cut away from the darkness of his material, so that when he turns to it again it strikes with increasing force....Sophie's Choice is a thriller of the highest order, all the more thrilling for the fact that the dark, gloomy secrets we are unearthing one by one--sorting through lies and terrible misunderstandings like a hand groping for a golden nugget in a rattlesnake's nest--may be authentic secrets of history and our own human nature."

The Modern Library has played a significant role in American cultural life for the better part of a century. The series was founded in 1917 by the publishers Boni and Liveright and eight years later acquired by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer. It provided the foundation for their next publishing venture, Random House. The Modern Library has been a staple of the American book trade, providing readers with affordable hard-bound editions of important works of liter-ature and thought. For the Modern Library's seventy-fifth anniversary, Random House redesigned the series, restoring as its emblem the running torchbearer created by Lucian Bernhard in 1925 and refurbishing jackets, bindings, and type, as well as inaugurating a new program of selecting titles. The Modern Library continues to provide the world's best books, at the best prices.

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Hardcover, 515 pages

Published April 12th 1979 by Random House (first published 1976)

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May 08, 2013 Steve aka Sckenda rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites-contemporary, 20th-century, holocaust, psychological, truth, new-york-city, poland, children, writers, writing, movie, modern-library-100, favorites, national-book-award, national-book-award-author

These characters are flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone. Styron’s words are written into my genetic code. His characters don’t just haunt me--they are me.

Call me Sophie. Sophie was a Polish Catholic wraith who washed ashore in Brooklyn as a postwar refugee. A tattooed number on her forearm testifies to her internment at Auschwitz; thick scars on her wrists proclaim her attempt at self-destruction. Guilt pursued Sophie like a demon:

Often I cry alone when I listen to music, which reminds me

...more These characters are flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone. Styron’s words are written into my genetic code. His characters don’t just haunt me--they are me.

Call me Sophie. Sophie was a Polish Catholic wraith who washed ashore in Brooklyn as a postwar refugee. A tattooed number on her forearm testifies to her internment at Auschwitz; thick scars on her wrists proclaim her attempt at self-destruction. Guilt pursued Sophie like a demon:

Often I cry alone when I listen to music, which reminds me of Cracow. And you know, there is one piece of music that I cannot listen to, it makes me cry so much. I cannot breathe, my eyes run like streams. It is in these Handel records, “I know that my Redeemer liveth,” that make me cry because of all my guilt, and also because I know that my Redeemer don’t live and my body will be destroyed by worms and my eyes will never, never again see God.” (99)

Sophie no longer plays piano or reads music.

Call Me Nathan. Sophie’s lover is exuberant, funny, and possessed of magisterial intelligence. Nathan’s knowledge of biology, literature, music, history, cuisine, cinema, and medicine is as encyclopedic as it capacious. With a gift for mimicry and comic bluster, he is “utterly and fatally glamorous.” Sophie and Nathan meet in the New York Public Library over the sad poems of Emily Dickinson. With assistance from Brahms and Thomas Wolfe, Nathan nurses Sophie back to health from scurvy. In her shaky English she whispers, “Nathan, thank you for making me to bloom like a rose.”

Nathan’s “liberated and passionate carnality” unlocks Sophie’s eroticism, which allows her to drown her guilt. Although he saves the life of Sophie, Nathan himself is also an afflicted refugee of a different sort. “I need you like death.” As a Jew, he regards himself as an authority on anguish and suffering, so he needles Stingo mercilessly regarding Southern apartheid and is suspicious of Sophie’s escape from Auschwitz--“while the millions choked on the gas.” She resents “the unearned happiness” of Nathan, but she is so chaotically in love with him that it is “like dementia.” Their destinies were wedded indissolubly.

Call Me Stingo. Into the immigrant world enters our narrator, a young Southern writer. When we first meet Stingo, his spirit is landlocked, and he is a stranger to both love and death, but Stingo will be sucked toward the “epicenter of a squall of gusty shifting emotions,” as the couple lays siege to his imagination.

Stingo, a virgin, yearns for Sophie while adoring Nathan as a glamorous elder brother. Because our narrator also loves literature and music, he sprinkles hundreds of “outlandishly eclectic” literary references throughout the novel as well as scores of references to classical music, which plays on the Victrola as we read. If you don’t like Stingo, you won’t like Styron. This book is not for those who dislike ornate writing, expensive words, or books about other books and writers.

Stingo, I must tell you something now that I’ve never told anyone before. Without knowing this, you wouldn’t understand anything about me at all.

Tell me, Sophie.

You must get me a drink first.

Choices. As the title implies, choices are made. There is a famous choice that Sophie made at Auschwitz “Don’t make me choose, I can’t choose.” In fact, there are many other choices throughout this book: choices about our attitudes-- about love and hate; life and death; about empathy and selfishness; weight and lightness; memory and forgetfulness; free will and fatalism; and optimism and despair.

Call me Steve. I choose this book. This book goes to the core of my being because I was wired for these words which fire my neural pathways. I choose Sophie. My love and desire for Sophie is deeply personal and mysterious. Perhaps it hints at the mystery of suffering and my own existence because I know that I am wired for a certain degree of sadness that coexists uncomfortably with my bedrock optimism. Thus, I choose Stingo. I was made to not break faith with belief in meaning. Like Stingo, I desire Sophie, and I am utterly convinced that I can save her. But failing that... I choose to remember. I choose to testify. I choose life.

May 7, 2013(less)

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May 26, 2007 Aaron Mccloud rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Anyone smart

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...more

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Jun 18, 2012 K.D. Oliveros rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to K.D. by: 501 Must Read Books; National Book Award

Shelves: drama, race, 501, 1001-core, national, saddest, time-100

It was good that I missed the Oscar-nominated movie adaptation of this book when it was shown in 1985. 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...more It was good that I missed the Oscar-nominated movie adaptation of this book when it was shown in 1985. 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 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) That is an awful, awful choice that no parent would like to make as the options are both unbearable. 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. internal. 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 626-page read but it is definitely worth your time.

I should read Styron's more popular work, The Confessions of Nat Turner soon. He is so good I can't wait to have a second serving.(less)

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Aug 10, 2012 Wordsmith rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Readers

Shelves: 1001, award-winning-book-or-author, bestsellers, classic, death-violent, favorite-author, history, health, genocide, holocaust, lit-southern, literature, lit-american, love-relationships, linguistic-marksmanship, read-years-ago, star-five

Read in the early eighties, this was a book that affected me in a profound, deeply personal way. Styron, along with so many authors of his generation, were the guides of the map that charted the course of a winding, long path. I found myself to be one of the willing seekers to their grail, inhaling all as I followed along.

There I was, traipsing, skipping, meandering, flying, all the while, reading words into song, and these were from the Masters, these Mozart's and Beethoven's and Liszt's of ST...more

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Jan 12, 2010 Laurel rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: classics, fiction, historical-fiction

There is a lot going on in this book. There is the story of Sophie, a beautiful Polish woman deeply scarred by her past and the unbelievably heart wrenching choice she was forced to make while a prisoner at Auschwitz during the holocaust. There's the story of her present day turbulent love affair with an often violent, drug-addicted man, and all the many complexities involved in an abusive relationship. There's also a hint of the irony of segregation and racism in post WWII America. And there's...more There is a lot going on in this book. There is the story of Sophie, a beautiful Polish woman deeply scarred by her past and the unbelievably heart wrenching choice she was forced to make while a prisoner at Auschwitz during the holocaust. There's the story of her present day turbulent love affair with an often violent, drug-addicted man, and all the many complexities involved in an abusive relationship. There's also a hint of the irony of segregation and racism in post WWII America. And there's an aspiring author named Stingo in the middle of it all, revealing to us each of these stories through his eyes and ears, all the while trying REALLY hard to get laid.

I was a bit surprised by all the semi-erotica in this book. I understood its purpose, but it just felt slightly odd to me in a book about the holocaust somehow. The author seemed particularly obsessed with the F word. For one normally very eloquent and vivid in his descriptions, it seemed he could find no other word to describe any of the sex scenes. Half a dozen times and I would not have really even noticed, but the word pops up what felt like a hundred times. I could have done with a slight tone down on that front.

Anyway, the real story, of course, is Sophie. Her family history, how she ended up in a concentration camp (she is not Jewish), the almost unfathomable decision she is forced to make while there, and how this secret changes who she is. The pain she feels, particularly in one scene, is so palpable it is hard even for the reader to bare.

If you have seen the movie, then you know what Sophie's choice is. If you haven't, I won't say, as it is not revealed until the end of the book. I will say that the emotions stirred from its telling is just as intense and heart wrenching as the film.

This book is not an easy read. It is full of volatile, raw emotion. While flawed and a bit too long, I found that the compassion and humanity felt throughout made it in the end a worthwhile and very moving read.(less)

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Sep 12, 2012 Sarah rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: things-you-can-t-unsee

I know, I know. At the rate I'm going, I'll soon have abandoned more books than I've finished.

I'm just not so keen on contemporary literature, I suppose. Modern fiction, for the most part, has become indistinguishable from magazine writing: pretentious yet self-deprecating, staccato ("relatable") language, a smattering of intellectual/poetic adornment, some social commentary, and the contents of your medicine cabinet -- to show that this is an intimate communication between us. Sophie's Choice...more

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Jan 08, 2011 Chanda rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I was surprised by this book; it wasn't what I expected. It was less engaging than I anticipated it being and parts of it were rather difficult for me to get through. The 'growing pains' of Stingo were not where my interest was centered. I think he's kind of a pansy to be honest. I'm also surprised at the sexual content. I'm aware that he's a sexually frustrated young man, but god- get on with it! I'm not offended by sexual content, I just don't need to be drowning in it. I have never heard the...more

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Apr 01, 2008 Monty Merrick rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Readers who like being emotionally manipulated by horny narrators

It seems a lot of people have a problem with the prose being pretentious and overwritten. However, I had a big problem with the unfolding of the plot. This was a strange book for me because I really wanted to like it and even thought I liked it after I was finished. It took me about a week to think back and realize, Wait! That was a crappy book.

Problem number 1: I personally found Sophie to be an unbeleivable character. I just thought she was not-fascinating and contradictory, like, not in the...more It seems a lot of people have a problem with the prose being pretentious and overwritten. However, I had a big problem with the unfolding of the plot. This was a strange book for me because I really wanted to like it and even thought I liked it after I was finished. It took me about a week to think back and realize, Wait! That was a crappy book.

Problem number 1: I personally found Sophie to be an unbeleivable character. I just thought she was not-fascinating and contradictory, like, not in the way people are in real life. I'll spare you the tedium of elaborating. You can take my word for it or not but the worst is yet to come.

Personally, I found Nathan to be a very realistic, frightening character. I know people like him in real life.

But, Problem number 2: Styron tells this story from the first-person perspective of someone who has already gathered all the information, heard everyone's side of the story and studied World War Two. In other words, he seems to be telling the story in the wrong form. There are a lot of flashbacks and "Sophie's Choice" isn't revealed to us until the rest of the present-time turmoil is underway as well. As a reader, I've never felt more manipulated. The narrator, Stingo, reveals stuff little by little but only in a way that is sure to make everything more meladramatic and painful. It seems done not to prove a point but to give the book some tragic affect though it comes off beyond contrived.

Not only did I feel manipulated, but I just didn't seem realistic how much information Stingo knew about Sophie, no matter how close they were. I'm not just talking about personal information, because we all have friends who tell us personal things but he tells parts of Sophie's story as though he were inside her head. It just felt like a huge narrative mistake ... more something to be expected of a book with an unreliable narrator, though we're supposed to put our full trust and faith in this narrator.

Problem 3: It feels like Styron was trying to make a book that studied too many subjects at once. It's okay to tackle multiple subjects, but he doesn't handle any of them. He's trying to study psychosis and addiction, death, life, war, peace, prison camps, nazi mentality, anti-semitism, growing up, sexuality, sexuality, more sexuality wrapped into every other subject until it doesn't make any coherent sense anymore.

I only decided to read this after Lie Down in Darkness which is infinitely better. I'm surprised that this is considered a great American novel and would never recommend it.(less)

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Nov 21, 2011 Moses Kilolo rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

First, I liked everything about this book:
Stingo,
Nathan,
& Sophie.
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.
Well, we may blame God as much as we wish, or even do as Sophie did and say 'FUCK God and all his Hande Werk.' Or resolve to the thought that stuff like Auschwitz makes us lose faith in human...more

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Jun 28, 2009 blake rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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!" moment when it would finally get good. To me 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 narrated 50...more

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Sep 10, 2008 Amber rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to Amber by: BookBags

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.

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Jul 01, 2012 Richard rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This title is on the very shortest list of the best novels I've ever read. It starts inconspicuously as the remembrance of a young writer, Stingo, a graduate of Duke who has recently been discharged from the U.S. Marine Corps at the end of World War II and is living in New York. Stingo's twin goals are to find a way to score with women, and to write a book. He takes a room in a boarding house in Brooklyn, where he befriends fellow tenants Nathan Landau and his girlfriend Sophie Zawistowski. Nath...more This title is on the very shortest list of the best novels I've ever read. It starts inconspicuously as the remembrance of a young writer, Stingo, a graduate of Duke who has recently been discharged from the U.S. Marine Corps at the end of World War II and is living in New York. Stingo's twin goals are to find a way to score with women, and to write a book. He takes a room in a boarding house in Brooklyn, where he befriends fellow tenants Nathan Landau and his girlfriend Sophie Zawistowski. Nathan is an intellectual who claims to be a Harvard educated scientist. Sophie came to the United States as a war refugee, who has survived the Auschwitz prison camp in Poland.

The book is very funny in parts, particularly when Stingo is recounting his attempted exploits with young women who don't ultimately provide him with the fulfillment of his fantasies. In one instance, he gloms onto Leslie Lapidus, a college student spending time at the beach during summer vacation, who curses like a sailor and therefore should welcome Stingo's advances, or so he schemes. What could possibly go wrong with this plan?

The trio of boarders become close friends during the summer of '47. They all have unresolved issues which will gradually become known. Guilt is a common bond among them. Stingo is aware, as a native Virginian, that his ancestors owned slaves, and he decides to deal with his family history shame by writing a book about the 1830's slave rebellion led by Nat Turner. Nathan's friendliness and wit are interrupted at times by rage over the fate of his fellow Jews in Europe recently, and by his realization that he didn't do his part in fighting the Nazi's because mental health issues prevented him from joining the armed forces. Sophie shares the common fate of many death camp survivors who welcomed the chance for life when they were liberated from the camps, but continue to realize that they lived while so many of their relatives and friends perished.

Nathan is actually a paranoid schizophrenic who is violent and abusive toward Sophie at times. His anger at these times is aggravated by the knowledge that Sophie is entitled to the status of a Holocaust victim while not being Jewish. She is a Roman Catholic Pole whose father was a Jew-hater. She was sent to Auschwitz for the crime of stealing food for her family to survive. She was able to avoid death in the camp by becoming a secretary to the Commandant.

Nathan is also increasingly jealous of Stingo's adoring friendship with Sophie. Stingo actually increasingly lusts after Sophie and before the book is over, he will be able to make his feelings known to her while rescuing her from an angry Nathan. This is the point where Styron, through Sophie, describes the personal, daily loss of humanity and life prevalent in the World War II concentration camps. It is also the point where Stingo learns the secret which Sophie has been carrying for the last several years, a secret whose anguish is pushing her to the depths of depression. Stingo is a committed friend of Sophie in her time of need and hopes he saved her from self-destructing with Nathan. The book's ending will resolve the fates of these three friends.

My recollection of the book's conclusion, even after a number of years, is of reading something so profound that it makes you stop for a minute and digest what just happened. It is the kind of reaction you can only experience from a book which is crafted with such skill, it makes you viscerally feel the impact of its conclusion. Styron, in my opinion, succeeds as a writer according to his own definition: "A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end."

William Styron, 1925 to 2006, novelist and essayist, was born in Newport News, Virginia. He attended college before serving with the Marines during World War II. After the war, he enrolled in Duke University, graduating with a BA degree in English. He experienced his first writing success in 1951 with the novel "Lie Down in Darkness." Before "Sophie", he was best known for his controversial novel "The Confessions of Nat Turner", 1967. His critical acclaim grew significantly with the publishing of "Darkness Visible", 1990, about his decades-long descent into depression.

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Dec 02, 2008 Mike rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

It is difficult to describe, in these few lines, the emotions felt when reading such a work. The scope and the grandeur are beyond limit. However, at times, the book does seem a little bloated, especially in its pseudo-erotic scenes.

However, when touching upon the Holocaust, it is difficult to argue or consider any passages as overreaching or unnecessary. In this, "Sophie's Choice" remains a document to be cherished and admired.

It is the character of Nathan Landau that remains a little contentio...more

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Aug 31, 2008 Nathan rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Everyone on earth

Recommended to Nathan by: Amy Wilkinson

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...more

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Jul 16, 2008 Mark Benham added it · review of another edition

Anyone else feel as ambivalent towards this 'modern classic' as I do? On the one hand, he makes the terrible subject matter of the Holocaust into a powerful read for a wide audience. And he's written a page-turner with a screenwriter's sense of painting a vivid scene. And it's a clever combination of the two great strands in 20th Century American ficiton: the urban Jewish adventure and the Southern gentleman at large in the world. But the characters are barely believable ciphers, it's schematic...more

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Jun 20, 2008 Anne Marie rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I was in the local library last spring break (procrastinating from grading, etc), browsing a shelf of high school reading list books. I wanted to check something out as a reward for the work I was hopefully going to eventually do. I really love Deer Hunter-era Meryl Streep, and even though I've never seen Sophie's Choice, I vaguely remembered the movie coming out when I was a little girl, and Meryl being especially beautiful. I had also just finished The Book Thief and was feeling achy for anoth...more

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May 06, 2008 Pantopicon rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: american-literature

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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May 11, 2008 David Hughes rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Nathan is brilliant, quite mad, and deeply in love with Sophie, the tortured Polish survivor of Auschwitz. Stingo, the young narrator and aspiring novelist from the South, travels to Brooklyn where he immediately falls under the couple's spell. The development of the story is the unraveling and sorting out among the lies and the truth of these two enigmatic people. Nathan loves Sophie but cannot control his need to punish her for the Gentile sins against the Jewish race. Sophie, consumed with gu...more

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May 09, 2008 Leah rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Oh, man. I can't seem to finish a book. First with the Henry VIII's wives (which I'm slowly finishing... emphasis on SLOWLY) and then the Salman Rushdie one. It got too wordy. Anyway, this one's pretty wordy too, but in a really sarcastic way, although I have already circled more than a few words to look up in the dictionary later. I bought this at the Holocaust museum when I went there with my sister. I had always heard of it, and several people have told me throughout my life to read it, but I...more

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Jun 26, 2007 Samara rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: those looking to define evil

Shelves: plainolfiction

I read the last pages of this book in a bowling alley, humanity in its finest clinging to the ending of this book as surely as the overpowering cigarette smoke did.

I can't help but think that this may be one of the best ways to finish this particular book, so fraught with the question of humanity as it is. A terrible sense of aloneness pervades this book, and I can't help but think that being surrounded by drinking, cursing men and women in bowling shoes really concentrated that lonelinesss for...more

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Jul 16, 2007 Serena rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: anyone who appreciates beautiful prose and/or anyone looking to expand their vocabulary

This book is the most well-written and most beautifully written that I have ever read. It's worth reading just for the prose and for the flawless vocabulary. Every word that Styron uses is the PERFECT word - nothing express his meaning better than the word he selects. I had to look up a word I didn't know just about every page, and I'd like to think that my vocabulary isn't too shabby!

While it's worth reading just for the writing, the story takes the book to the next level (I hate myself a littl...more

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Apr 24, 2007 Robert rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Even if Styron had written nothing else, Sophie’s Choice would assure him a competitive head-start as the true inheritor of Faulkner’s mad, moral explorations. Not as ambitious or explosive as The Confessions of Nat Turner, in Sophie’s Choice Styron spins outward from his central moral dilemma to painfully and artfully explore the legacy of slavery on the southern white soul, the hilarity and tragedy of lust and longing, and a great, fearful, and hopeful wondering on the healing power of time an...more

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Aug 02, 2011 Heidi Thorsen added it · review of another edition

Wow. This was the best-written book I've read in a very long time. It wasn't what I was expecting. I didn't even know it was a book, I'd only ever heard about the film (which I never saw, based on the synopsis on the box it seemed like it would be too grim for my taste). But I got the Kindle sample of the book, and from reading the sample thought that the book title must just be coincidence, this isn't some grim holocaust tome, so I bought the book.

Well, my first impression wasn't exactly right....more

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Mar 29, 2009 Philip rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Forget the movie! Read the book! I think this is one of the best books I have ever read. When I first read it, about two years ago, it totally inhabited my mind and even now, two years later, scenes from the book keep drifting through my head. No wonder William Styron is celebrated-- this book is amazing. And amazing on so many levels. First of all, Styron engages just about every emotion there is-- some of this book contained some of the funniest scenes I think I've every read, some descend int...more

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Apr 13, 2013 Rosie Waine rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I have to say straight off the bat that I read this AFTER watching the film adaptation (1985). Perhaps had I picked it up before-hand I would have had a completely different experience with it. Though I really enjoyed it there were moments when I found myself really hating the voice of the main character, Stingo, who had grown to be my favourite character in the film version of the story.

The Stingo in the book grated on me in a way I didn't expect at all. Though I understood his motivations - e...more

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Mar 18, 2013 Al rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Sophie’s Choice is William Styron’s classic novel of love, survival, and regret, set in Brooklyn in the wake of the Second World War. The novel centers on three characters: Stingo, a sexually frustrated aspiring novelist; Nathan, his charismatic but violent Jewish neighbor; and Sophie, an Auschwitz survivor who is Nathan’s lover. Their entanglement in one another’s lives will build to a stirring revelation of agonizing secrets that will change them forever.

Poetic in its execution, and epic in

...more

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Feb 22, 2013 Klint Kratzer rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Sophie's Choice is such a rich novel, tying together three scenes and stories. From the bucolic Virginia countryside, through the streets of 1940s NYC and the journey of the protagonist into and out of the perdition of Auschwitz, Styron re-enters the defining moment of the century in the nascent epi-center of Western culture (NYC). This novel will make you cry with laughter and sorrow.

It is, overall, the journey of one woman on her final sojourn towards life- it is a tale of things that are wors...more

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Nov 29, 2012 Bob Bogle rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I've just picked up off the shelf my impossibly massive paperback copy of SOPHIE'S CHOICE, which I read in about 1988 and have been lugging around ever since. Jeeze. I never saw the movie until out of the blue it occurred to me last week that the library probably had a DVD copy. They did. Finally I watched it. I see now on Wikipedia that Styron died in 2006. I didn't know that. I'm sorry to learn it today, because this was an important writer and I miss him.

So everyone knows about this book, or...more I've just picked up off the shelf my impossibly massive paperback copy of SOPHIE'S CHOICE, which I read in about 1988 and have been lugging around ever since. Jeeze. I never saw the movie until out of the blue it occurred to me last week that the library probably had a DVD copy. They did. Finally I watched it. I see now on Wikipedia that Styron died in 2006. I didn't know that. I'm sorry to learn it today, because this was an important writer and I miss him.

So everyone knows about this book, or at least about the movie, and the movie was about as close to the book as I've ever seen Hollywood get - remarkable, that. I just wanted to make a few comments, and the first is about how daring, or foolhardy, it is for anyone to think about writing a novel involving the camps. You're just about guaranteed from the outset to fail, to fall far, far short, and to end up trivializing and cheapening what you and everyone else feels deeply about on some level. I'm unsure any storyteller can ever show us anything more significant than we can see in Spielberg's movie SCHINDLER'S LIST or see in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, or at other sites around the world. No writer could ever invent the horrors of the 20th Century. The psychological implications revealed during that era continue to be overwhelmingly depressing for we who were born human beings. In the final analysis in this novel we have two very complex persons with lives so damaged that the only elegant and proper solution to their suffering is death: felo-de-se as a fit and properly moral resolution.

By itself a straightforward telling of Sophie's story in Poland would probably have been disastrous, but Styron pulls it off by peeling back layers of the onion in flashback, alternating between present and past. Despite the horror of her final choice (better realized in the movie than in the book, I think), what we still care about most is the aftermath of Sophie's agony, the ongoing, inescapable psychological damage it has wrought, so it's not directly a story of the camps. A story of Brooklyn, not of Poland. Smart, that, or more probably lucky for Styron to have stumbled upon that approach. Very. Two books in one: the past with its consequences fingering on and on into the present.

The characters. Poor Stingo: unfortunate name. He does so little in this story, something like Nick in GATSBY, a necessary POV storyteller, but Stingo seems to me an improbable friend to Nathan and Sophie. I've no doubt GATSBY was on Styron's mind when he was writing this book, another outsider witness to a tragic love story. And Nathan is such a strange companion for Sophie; of course it was absolutely necessary that he be severely psychologically broken too, but his damage had to be concealed; had it been evident from the start there would have been no great love story. Again Styron arrived at a clever way of accomplishing that necessity, although I'm really rather skeptical that Stingo wouldn't have perceived early on that there was something really mentally wrong with his friend.

There is really something in this novel that works as if it were a subtle and dark geometric proof of Nietzsche that God is dead, and by no means in the pedestrian and familiar form of the Holocaust providing the final "proof." It is the fact that Sophie is fully capable of love - she can love, she is loved - and yet she chooses death as her solution, her only "viable" solution. Death in the end is the only acceptable expression of love of which she (like Nathan) is capable in a life that is far beyond not redemption but repair. The secret subtext of this novel is the crippling of the soul that life can sometimes inflict upon fragile human beings, and we're all fragile human beings: a crippling so severe that we cannot recover. This is not an American story. In America we do not believe it's impossible to recover from certain kinds of trauma. We're lightyears away from the end of ROMEO AND JULIETTE here. In SOPHIE'S CHOICE finally death is not preferable to other solutions, but life itself, even with moments of terrible, painful sweetness, is so intolerable that death is the only solution.

Now that I know about the depression that wracked Styron's own life this novel is cast in a new light. That may or may not be unfair: lots of people try always to separate the artist from the art. But at a minimum I think in this novel Styron, like Fitzgerald, is saying to America: some of your deepest, most profound assumptions are false.(less)

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Nov 18, 2012 Athena rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I read this book a long time ago and liked it a lot, however, it took a while to get there. Once you get to the end of the book, everything you read starts to make sense, but at the same time the events seem almost insignificant compared to Sophie's story. For me, since it's been a few years, the things I actually remember are a bit vague, and it seems as though the ONLY important part of the story IS Sophie's choice.

I could've done without Stingo, even if he is the narrator, he is a tenant in...more

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Nov 09, 2012 Smcleish rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Originally published on my blog here in May 2001.

Sophie's Choice must rank as one of the most powerful novels I have ever read. It is the story of young writer Stingo, who meets an older couple, dynamic Nathan and beautiful Auschwitz survivor Sophie. They have a strange, three-way relationship which gradually leads to increasingly harrowing revelations about Sophie's time in the concentration camp, finally culminating in the truly horrific choice she was forced to make.

The novel is not quite as...more Originally published on my blog here in May 2001.

Sophie's Choice must rank as one of the most powerful novels I have ever read. It is the story of young writer Stingo, who meets an older couple, dynamic Nathan and beautiful Auschwitz survivor Sophie. They have a strange, three-way relationship which gradually leads to increasingly harrowing revelations about Sophie's time in the concentration camp, finally culminating in the truly horrific choice she was forced to make.

The novel is not quite as simple as this summary indicates. Important issues separate from the main plot include the fact that Nathan is Jewish but Sophie isn't; not all the victims of the "final solution" were Jews. Stingo is a liberal Southerner, and some parallels are made between Nazi racism and the treatment of blacks in the South. This isn't insisted on terribly strongly, for the obvious reason that the situation in the US has never been as bad as in Germany, but Styron clearly wants to say something about the ways in which things could have developed. (He talks about the way in which populist white politicians such as Huey Long tended to drift into racism at one point; there would have been some possibility that a man like this could have ended up as an American Hitler).

The emotional centre of the novel is, cleverly, not Sophie's devastating flashback descriptions but Stingo's experience of his relationship to the older couple. This contains lust and pity for Sophie, admiration for Nathan combined with apprehension about his growing mental instability, and envy of the love the couple share. This helps the novel because a bare description of the realities of Auschwitz would be numbingly intense; it affects the reader more because of the contrast and relief afforded by the scenes from the novel's present, the late forties. (The odd reference makes it clear that it is supposedly written by Stingo many years later.)

Clearly, Sophie's Choice is an important novel, providing a powerful viewpoint looking back at one of the most terrible atrocities of the twentieth century, helping us to feel why it is important not to let it happen again. It doesn't cover all the aspects of the Holocaust - there is little on why it could happen, or what drove particular officers to such heights of cruelty, for example - but for the themes it concentrates on (being a survivor, being an American Jew discovering what happened after the war), it is masterful. (less)

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About William Styron

William Styron (1925–2006), born in Newport News, Virginia, was one of the greatest American writers of his generation. Styron published his first book, Lie Down in Darkness, at age twenty-six and went on to write such influential works as the controversial and Pulitzer Prize–winning The Confessions of Nat Turner and the international bestseller Sophie’s Choice.

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Quotes from Sophie's Choice

“Someday I will understand Auschwitz. 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 and death, and thereby help demonstrate how absolute evil is never extinguished from the world. 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?"

And the answer: "Where was man?” — 29 people liked it

“This was not judgment day - only morning. Morning: excellent and fair.” — 8 people liked it

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