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92nd out of 3,797 books
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Sophie's Choice
Three stories are told: a young Southerner wants to become a writer; a turbulent love-hate affair between a brilliant Jew and a beautiful Polish woman; and of an awful wound in that woman's past--one that impels both Sophie and Nathan toward destruction.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
Paperback, Vintage International Edition, 562 pages
Published
March 3rd 1992
by Vintage Books
(first published 1976)
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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...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 ...more
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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
Monty Merrick
rated it
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,...more
Problem number 1: I personally found Sophie to be an unbeleivable character. I just thought she was not-fascinating and contradictory, like,...more
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 W...more
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 W...more
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 even...more
The narration was clumsy and over-explanatory. Do you really have to recap an even...more
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.
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 ...more
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 ...more
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 ...more
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 ...more
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 holo...more
Mark Benham
added it
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
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
This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it,
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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
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,...more
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 lon...more
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 lon...more
Serena
rated it
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...more
While it's worth reading just for the writing, the story takes the book to the next level (I hate...more
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 a...more
Heidi Thorsen
added it
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 r...more
Well, my first impression wasn't exactly r...more
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
This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it,
click here.
In August I read an essay by Alexandra Styron that partly recounted the first time she tried to read her father’s most famous most famous work. “Sophie’s Choice” by William Styron was still in galley form, and I suppose, symbolically, so was she. Alexandra made it about as far as the narrator’s erotic dream before she worried about barfing on her loafers. Then, despite the hullabaloo that surrounded the movie and the fact that she, herself, became a writer, she didn’t double back until she was i...more
"Le choix de Sophie" est construit sur la superposition de trois thèmes. Le premier est le récit fortement autobiographique de Stingo, de ses tribulations professionnelles, amoureuses, sexuelles. Le deuxième est la relation amoureuse passionnelle, torride, merveilleuse, violente et destructrice de Nathan et Sophie dont Stingo est l'observateur. C'est une nouvelle approche bien conduite du thème tant de fois exploré de "l'amour à la mort". Le troisième thème est le passé conce...more
I am disappointed by this book. I had great expectations considering the contents of this story and I was upset that William Styron used "Sophie's Choice" as it's climax all the while filling the middle pages with fluff. And I use the word climax lightly.
What the hell?!
Sophie's Choice is about a Polish woman, Sophie, who is imprisioned at Auschwitz along with her two children. Upon arrival, she is forced to make a crushing choice that will forever plague...more
What the hell?!
Sophie's Choice is about a Polish woman, Sophie, who is imprisioned at Auschwitz along with her two children. Upon arrival, she is forced to make a crushing choice that will forever plague...more
This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it,
click here.
So, here's a snippet of the book.
"Call me Stingo, which was the nickname I was known by in those days, if I was called anything at all. The name derives from my prep-school days down in my native state of Virginia. This school was a pleasant institution to which I was sent at fourteen by my distraught father, who found me difficult to handle after my mother died. Among my other disheveled qualities was apparently an inattention to personal hygiene, hence I soon became known as S...more
"Call me Stingo, which was the nickname I was known by in those days, if I was called anything at all. The name derives from my prep-school days down in my native state of Virginia. This school was a pleasant institution to which I was sent at fourteen by my distraught father, who found me difficult to handle after my mother died. Among my other disheveled qualities was apparently an inattention to personal hygiene, hence I soon became known as S...more
I really like the point-of-view the story is narrated in. Stingo is older and telling a story about a point in his past, and in a way, how he is still struggling to make complete sense of it. I like how in the narration, his youthful naivete and his bias toward his relationships (especially concerning Sophie and Nathan) are not censored, but emphasized. I like how his narration is the reason why I felt sympathy and pity for Nathan and especially Sophie. Nathan is not a monster, a violent pers...more
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 ...more
A writer once said (I ...more
Putting aside for a moment my dislike at giving this wholly new kind of novel (though decades old) the same rating as a fellow reader of mine who frequents this site, I'll deal with my reservations first.
This great tale, starting with young "Stingo" in Brooklyn, weaves in and out of Flatbush and Poland and Washington, DC and Virginia and a few more places I'm probably forgetting. The desultory nature of it is, besides the superfluous and poetically gratuitous sex vignettes...more
This great tale, starting with young "Stingo" in Brooklyn, weaves in and out of Flatbush and Poland and Washington, DC and Virginia and a few more places I'm probably forgetting. The desultory nature of it is, besides the superfluous and poetically gratuitous sex vignettes...more
Pikachu
rated it
“I had never heard of Rudolf Hoss before that day, but through her understaded, simple eloquence she had caused him to exist as vividly as any apparition that had stalked my most neurotic dreams.” This haunting quote, taken from the main character, Stingo, after he hears another gruesome account of Sophie's time spent in Auschwitz, sums up the experience of reading this book well. The accounts are so harrowing, so gritty and real, that you have to remind yourself that, while horrors like these a...more
| topics | posts | views | last activity | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| what was Sophie's choice? | 12 | 181 | Jan 10, 2012 02:08pm | |
| bfl book club: Christina's choice for February is... | 1 | 4 | Dec 17, 2011 09:55pm | |
| William Stryon: Sound familiar? | 1 | 2 | Aug 26, 2011 03:01am |
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William Clark Styron, Jr. was an American novelist and essayist who won major literary awards for his work.
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“To make matters worse, I was out of a job and had very little money and was self-exiled to Flatbush—like others of my countrymen, another lean and lonesome Southerner wandering amid the Kingdom of the Jews.”
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