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Sophie's Choice

William Styron

4.18 · Rating details · 82,561 ratings · 2,588 reviews

In this extraordinary novel, Stingo, an inexperienced twenty-two year old Southerner, takes us back to the summer of 1947 and a boarding house in a leafy Brooklyn suburb. There, he meets Nathan, a fiery Jewish intellectual; and Sophie, a beautiful and fragile Polish Catholic. Stingo is drawn into the heart of their passionate and destructive relationship as witness, confid ...more

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Paperback, Vintage Classics Edition, 632 pages

Published February 5th 2004 by Vintage Classics (first published 1979)

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Jun 28, 2018 Julie rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: new-york-state-of-mind, you-ll-need-a-cigarette

We are like lutes once held by God.
Being away from His warm body
fully explains our constant yearning.
--Hafiz

I started Sophie's Choice in a busy hotel lobby, awaiting my visiting sister's arrival, having no idea I was going to be immediately introduced to a 22-year-old Southerner named Stingo and the first of his many erections.

His erections? What?

I went into this read almost “blind,” knowing only that the author, William Styron, received the Pulitzer for fiction in 1968 for The Confessions of Na ...more

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Jul 28, 2019 Jeffrey Keeten rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Recommended to Jeffrey by: Walker Smith

Shelves: 1940s, ww2, poland

”Mercifully, I was at the age when reading was still a passion and thus, save for a happy marriage, the best state possible in which to keep absolute loneliness at bay. I could not have made it through those evenings otherwise. But I was an abandoned reader and, besides, outlandishly eclectic, with an affinity for the written word--almost any written word--that was so excitable that it verged on the erotic. I mean this literally, and were it not for the fact that I have compared notes with a few ...more

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Apr 01, 2008 Monty Merrick rated it did not like it · 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 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. ...more

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Jul 19, 2020 Candi rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: book-i-own, ww-2, historical-fiction, chunksters, kindle

“The landscape and the living figures of that summer, as in some umber-smeared snapshot found in the brittle black pages of an old album, had become more dusty and indistinct as time for me unspooled with negligent haste into my own middle age, yet that summer’s agony still cried out for explanation.”

Humor, Brooklyn, mental illness, eroticism, and the Holocaust. Sounds like an unlikely concoction for a novel, doesn’t it? This was totally unexpected! The only knowledge I had going into this is th “The landscape and the living figures of that summer, as in some umber-smeared snapshot found in the brittle black pages of an old album, had become more dusty and indistinct as time for me unspooled with negligent haste into my own middle age, yet that summer’s agony still cried out for explanation.”

Humor, Brooklyn, mental illness, eroticism, and the Holocaust. Sounds like an unlikely concoction for a novel, doesn’t it? This was totally unexpected! The only knowledge I had going into this is that it was a wildly popular film about World War II starring Meryl Streep, and that it would involve some troubling ‘choice’ of some sort. What I walked away from was a deeply moving, brilliantly written, sometimes overblown, story about three people whose lives converge during the summer of 1947.

“I was fated to get ensnared, like some hapless June bug, in the incredible spider’s nest of emotions that made up the relation between Sophie and Nathan…”

In one way, this is a coming of age novel. Stingo is a twenty-two year old aspiring writer who has moved to Brooklyn after being dismissed from McGraw-Hill. He is plagued by the stigma of male virginity as well as a wicked case of persistent tumescence. The decision to narrate this story from Stingo’s point of view at first both puzzled and intrigued me. I expected this to be from Sophie’s perspective or from some omniscient narrator. It didn’t take long for me to grab onto Stingo and go along for the ride with him. When Stingo moves into The Pink Palace, a rooming house in a primarily Jewish neighborhood, he is a bit out of his element. However, it’s not long before he’s wholly caught up in the sexually charged atmosphere of two of his fellow boarders, the bright but volatile Nathan Landau, and the beautiful and tragic Sophie Zawistowski.

"… I encountered Sophie in the flesh for the first time and fell, if not instantaneously, then swiftly and fathomlessly in love with her. It was a love which, as time wore on that summer, I realized had many reasons for laying claim to my existence.”

What I loved best about this novel were the moments we spent with Stingo, Nathan and Sophie in the here and now. There is something very satisfying to me as a reader about a magnetic story of unrequited love, a passionate love affair, a genuine friendship, and compelling dialogue. This is what I found between this trio. As Sophie becomes comfortable in Stingo’s company, she unveils another strand of the plot. We hear about her past as she relates it to him. Of course, like many narratives, we, like Stingo, don’t get the whole truth at once. Her time spent in Auschwitz is revealed to us, but on her own terms. It’s a painful story and one that will not be fully confessed until you reach the finish line.

“… it is now clear to me that a hideous sense of guilt always chiefly governed the reassessments she was forced to make of her past. I also came to see that she tended to view her own recent history through a filter of self-loathing—apparently not a rare phenomenon among those who had undergone her particular ordeal.”

The plot alternates then between the present day and a series of flashbacks. While important and necessary to Sophie’s story and her frame of mind, I found the flashbacks to be less compelling than the whole. They were drawn out to the point I felt taken out of the story and had to set it aside and read something else. It’s not often I can say that about Holocaust fiction. I wish these sections had been edited a bit more; I suspect the impact would have been even greater. Furthermore, I couldn’t put my finger on it at first, but what I came to realize by the end was that I felt slightly manipulated by the author. I know this is likely an unpopular opinion, but I started to recall the agony of reading a completely different novel – A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. And while I’m whining a bit, I might as well add one more complaint here and get it over with. I was not a fan of the author’s voice coming through Stingo. Yep, I said it. At the beginning it was just a little irritant in the back of my mind, but by the last few pages of the book I was oddly provoked! From what I understand, this novel is partially autobiographical and once discovered I couldn’t separate Stingo from Styron.

Having said all that, I’m simply trying to explain why what I thought initially would be a five star novel moved down a notch into 4 star territory. Regardless, it’s a book I would highly recommend to anyone. It’s exceptional and unforgettable. I am once again left reflecting on the nature of humankind. I thought about the ordinariness of both the perpetrators and the victims of the pure evil that was the Holocaust. No one person is completely demonized or glorified. Sophie is not painted as a noble innocent yet we are wholly drawn to her and can more easily empathize with her as a result. Her pain and her joy are palpable throughout. How does one make it from one day to the next when all faith is lost?

“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?’” ...more

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May 26, 2007 Aaron Mccloud rated it it was amazing · 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 01, 2014 Dolors rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Recommends it for: Those not afraid of evil

Recommended to Dolors by: sckenda

Shelves: read-in-2014, best-ever, dost

“Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.” Emily Dickinson

Styron brings the Brooklyn of the forties and its flourishing intellectualism back to life through the eyes of three characters, whose irreconcilable pasts find a common ground in the sweeping vision of optimistic America, distancing the narrative from stereotyped clichés and with the inimitable diction of a true Southern voice.
A lush, descriptive prose soaked in an a ...more

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Aug 10, 2019 Ahmad Sharabiani rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, war, united-states, historical, 20th-century, literature, classics

Sophie's Choice, William Styron

Sophie's Choice is a 1979 novel by American author William Styron. It concerns the relationships between three people sharing a boarding house in Brooklyn: Stingo, a young aspiring writer from the South, and the Jewish scientist Nathan Landau and his lover Sophie, a Polish Catholic survivor of the German Nazi concentration camps, whom he befriends. The novel was the basis of a 1982 film of the same name.

Stingo, a novelist who is recalling the summer when he began Sophie's Choice, William Styron

Sophie's Choice is a 1979 novel by American author William Styron. It concerns the relationships between three people sharing a boarding house in Brooklyn: Stingo, a young aspiring writer from the South, and the Jewish scientist Nathan Landau and his lover Sophie, a Polish Catholic survivor of the German Nazi concentration camps, whom he befriends. The novel was the basis of a 1982 film of the same name.

Stingo, a novelist who is recalling the summer when he began his first novel, has been fired from his low-level reader's job at the publisher McGraw-Hill and has moved into a cheap boarding house in Brooklyn, where he hopes to devote some months to his writing.

While he is working on his novel, he is drawn into the lives of the lovers Nathan Landau and Sophie Zawistowska, fellow boarders at the house, who are involved in an intense and difficult relationship.

Sophie is beautiful, Polish, and Catholic, and a survivor of the Holocaust and Nazi concentration camps; Nathan is a Jewish-American, and, purportedly, a genius. Although Nathan claims to be a Harvard graduate and a cellular biologist with a pharmaceutical company, it is later revealed that this is a fabrication.

Almost no one (including Sophie and Stingo) knows that Nathan has paranoid schizophrenia. He sometimes behaves quite normally and generously, but there are times when he becomes frighteningly jealous, violent, abusive and delusional. As the story progresses, Sophie tells Stingo of her past.

She describes her violently anti-Semitic father, a law professor in Kraków; her unwillingness to help him spread his ideas; her arrest by the Nazis; and particularly, her brief stint as a stenographer-typist in the home of Rudolf Höss, the commander of Auschwitz, where she was interned.

She specifically relates her attempts to seduce Höss in an effort to persuade him that her blond, blue-eyed, German-speaking son should be allowed to leave the camp and enter the Lebensborn program, in which he would be raised as a German child.

She failed in this attempt and, ultimately, never learned of her son's fate. Only at the end of the book does the reader also learn what became of Sophie's daughter, named Eva. Later, Nathan's delusions have led him to believe that Stingo is having an affair with Sophie, and he threatens to kill them both. ...

تاریخ نخستین خوانش: روز یازدهم ماه آگوست سال 2018میلادی

عنوان: انتخاب سوفی؛ نویسنده: ویلیام استایرن؛ مترجمها: آرش رضاپور، افشین رضاپور؛ ویراستار فهیمه زاهدی؛ تهران نشر هنوز‏‫٬ 1396؛ ‬در 832ص؛ شابک 9786006047461؛ موضوع: داستانهای نویسندگان امریکایی - سده 20م

انتخاب سوفی معروف‌ترين اثر «ويليام استايرن» و يكی از جنجالی‌ترين رمان‌های جهان درباره‌ ی هولوكاست است؛ بسياری از نويسندگان، از جمله «كارلوس فوئنتس» و «نورمن ميلر»، به ستايش از داستان پرداخته اند؛ در اين كتاب عشق و مرگ و احساس گناه در هم تنيده شده‌ اند؛ تا خوانشگران را نیز از هزارتويی پر حادثه عبور دهند، و در پایان آنها را به بينشی تلخ، اما واقع‌گرايانه درباره‌ ی ماهيت شر برسانند؛

تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 02/07/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی ...more

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Dec 16, 2009 Lawyer rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Recommends it for: Anyone

Recommended to Lawyer by: Based on readings of other works by William Styron

Shelves: 1940s, 2014, southern-literature, 20th-century, national-book-award-winner, historical-fiction, loss, on-the-southern-literary-trail, sexuality, love

Sophie's Choice: William Styron's Novel of Choices, Hobson's and Otherwise

This novel was chosen by members of On the Southern Literary Trail as a group read for September, 2014.

Sophie's Choice, First Ed., First Prtg., William Styron, Random House, New York, New York, 1979

The gate to Auschwitz, where those in charge choose who lives and who dies

Life is but a series of choices, is it not? Some easy, quickly made, given no further thought. Others are more difficult. We worry about t ...more

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Apr 10, 2013 Vit Babenco rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

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. I certainly don’t accuse her, for from the point of view of hindsight her untruths seem fathomable beyond need of apology.

So it is with Sophie’s Choice – there is truth and there are lies.
And to get to the truth one must peel off so many layers of lies. And somet ...more

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Jun 27, 2020 ~Bookishly rated it did not like it

Shelves: bleh

I should probably begin by stating that my copy of Sophie's Choice has taken up residence under my stairs, in a plastic box, next to where all of the other dire books I have been unfortunate enough to read, are currently residing too, until I am able to donate them to the book farm, or anywhere apart from under my roof.

This book took me way too long to read than I'm happy with, and the sole reason for that is; it was a terrible book. I had been aching to get to this book, and after reading the I should probably begin by stating that my copy of Sophie's Choice has taken up residence under my stairs, in a plastic box, next to where all of the other dire books I have been unfortunate enough to read, are currently residing too, until I am able to donate them to the book farm, or anywhere apart from under my roof.

This book took me way too long to read than I'm happy with, and the sole reason for that is; it was a terrible book. I had been aching to get to this book, and after reading the intriguing premise (I usually enjoy Holocaust themed writing) I was expecting to experience a vast array of overwhelming emotions. But, of course, there wasn't a vast array of emotions at all at all. There was only one, and that was of anger.

The theme of The Holocaust was handled pathetically in this book. There was flowery, irritating writing without feeling, and this caused me to feel nothing for the Holocaust survivor, Sophie. She was a character that I grew to dislike more, as the story went on, and I blame that on the choice of narrative.

Styron can write, certainly, but he has the most irritating prose that I have ever experienced. Instead of writing about something that took place in simple, but effective terms, he has to do one better, and stick a goddamn bow on it. Sometimes I can allow for that, but as the plot was weak already, the writing style only added to my vexation.

Stingo, our mid-twenties narrator, is a writer, and enjoys spending his days moping around his work, thinking about sex, thinking about his constant erection( masturbating at the same time) and then, when he meets Sophie, a Holocaust survivor, all he is able to think about is taking her to his bed. I can tell you fellow readers, I know more about Stingo's penis, than I do about The Holocaust.

What this lacked, was another POV. Why couldn't we hear things from Sophie's perspective? After all, she is the main character of this story, is she not? When Stingo finally discovers the evils that Sophie was subjected to at the concentration camps, he vows he will make her story known to the world, but he's that dizzy with lust and the wanting of getting her into bed, causes that to never happen.

There are many themes in this book, such as The Holocaust and mental health, but they are just not explored or elaborated on. They pop up, and then they just pass through the characters and the plot, like ships in the night, and instead we are treated to a description of Stingo and his raging erection once again.

Stingo? I'm tired of reading that you have yet another erection.

The book also angers me, because I feel like Sophie wasn't given a voice. When she told Stingo about her life, I felt like she wasn't allowed to speak without him interrupting her, or telling her she knows exactly how she feels. How the hell can he possibly know that? It made me feel like Sophie was just a prop in order for Styron to get his personal opinions on paper.

It is a real shame that this book was written in such a strange, and detached way, and if more work was put into Sophie, and by that I mean actually allowing her to be a character, this may have turned out quite differently. ...more

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Jun 03, 2009 Andrew rated it it was ok · 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. 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 ...more

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Jul 29, 2020 Pedro rated it it was amazing

Shelves: now-you-re-in-new-york

Just after I turned this novel’s last page I felt slightly conflicted about the way I felt about it and also about how to rate it. My “problem” with it had nothing to do with anything else but its structure and how much had been told using flashbacks and by shifting perspectives. 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 (nea ...more

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May 03, 2014 Matt rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: classic-novels, historical-fiction

The term “Sophie’s Choice,” which derives from a critical plot point in William Styron’s eponymous novel, has become a prominent American idiom. You’ve probably heard it in your daily life. It was the subject of a relatively well-received movie starring Meryl Streep. Certainly, you’ve come across it if you’re a fan of The Simpsons. (A Sophie’s Choice joke is the kicker to Season 10, Episode 5’s “When You Dish Upon a Star”).

Despite its prevalence in the cultural landscape, I’m not going to assum ...more

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Jun 28, 2009 K.D. Absolutely rated it really liked it · review of another edition

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

Shelves: saddest, race, 501, national, drama, 1001-core, 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 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. ...more

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Feb 03, 2017 Alex rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Recommends it for: anyone who thinks they are safe

Shelves: unreliable-narrators, 2017, music, new-york-literary-biography, 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."

"In my career as a 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."

"In my career as a writer," says Stingo, Sophie's Choice's narrator, "I have always been attracted to morbid themes - suicide, rape, murder, military life, marriage, slavery." (I love that marriage is just slipped in there.) 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."

What hurts and frightens Styron is evil, and Sophie's Choice is about evil. 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. (view spoiler) Here's humanity according to Styron. In the end, (view spoiler) Did I mention that this book is a bummer?

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?" "Oh no, this is like Sophie's Choice." The ending of this book upset me so badly that I feel awful for ever making that joke. 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?"

And the answer: "Where was man?”

Styron would like us to make sure we're prepared to be there. ...more

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May 13, 2014 Cheryl rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: war-stories, fiction, library-books, mesmerizing, the-psyche

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.
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 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. This is madness traced from characters’ thoughts, placed delicately on the page, and transformed into drama. 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. It is a book about “1947, that cradle year of psychoanalysis in postwar America.”

There is only so much you can say about a book that almost everyone has read or seen on the big screen.

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. Plus, the telling signs that a book has deeply influenced me: when I start to see the characters in real people, when I’m sad to return the book to the library because I’m certain that it is one I must own, when I’m reminded of some writing technique and I think, Styron!

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…

...more

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Jul 01, 2008 Petra-X Off having adventures rated it did not like it · review of another edition

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. ...more

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Oct 27, 2013 Himanshu rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: unforgettables, reviewed

A Study in Faithlessness of Hope

OK, first let's get something over with. A young amateur (not so Southern) writer comes to Brooklyn, meets a Polish émigré, falls straight away in love with her. 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. Having foun ...more

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Sep 10, 2008 Amber rated it did not like it · 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. ...more

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Oct 26, 2013 Elise rated it liked it · review of another edition

I finally finished it, yes all 600 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. That description covers only about 10% of what happens in this novel. "Sophie's Choi I finally finished it, yes all 600 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. That description covers only about 10% of what happens in this novel. "Sophie's Choice," first of all, was a recollection told mostly through the perspective of Stingo, an aspiring writer who befriends Sohpie and her abusive Jewish boyfriend, Nathan, in 1947 Brooklyn, NY, where they all live in the same apartment complex. At first, I found the young 20-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 200 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.
...more

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Oct 20, 2019 Ned rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

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. As reader, my own story intersected this certainly autobiographical one in a special way, and I won’t be able to express my love for this book without telling both. I took a short course called “Literature of the Holocaust” in 1980, a couple of years before this came out. So I had familiarity with Wiesel, Barth, etc… and had enjoyed Corrie Ten Boom’s movie earlier and Anne Frank. If a novel leaves an indelible memory and evokes a deep and expansive personal response, I count it as a great book. As reader, my own story intersected this certainly autobiographical one in a special way, and I won’t be able to express my love for this book without telling both. I took a short course called “Literature of the Holocaust” in 1980, a couple of years before this came out. So I had familiarity with Wiesel, Barth, etc… and had enjoyed Corrie Ten Boom’s movie earlier and Anne Frank. When I was in high school we talked a great deal about the holocaust, I hope they still do.

1982 was the year I saw the movie version of this, on the big screen, with my wife whom I married the following year and is upstairs sleeping in right now. 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 1947 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. The film was breathtaking, especially Meryl Streep’s performance as Sophie, where her accents as a Polish multi-lingual refugee from the horrors of Auschwitz was, without exaggeration, one of the greatest dramatic feats in the history of film. My wife and I were already infatuated with her, having loved The Deer Hunter and The French Lieutenant’s Woman by then. 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. Stingo’s obsession with sex reminds me of my younger self, as my wife to be and I were discovering ourselves after our longstanding conservative upbringing. On top of that, I had been raised and encouraged to understand the Holocaust, and its attendant horrors were fresh – in fact, it continues to haunt me, as I now see in our political climate the tolerance for hatred and the ease with which we can demonize the “other”. The human psyche is vulnerable to fear which is all too easily channeled to hatred and can, sadly, erupt in genocide. For periods of my life I’ve been more hopeful that humanity has moved to a more enlightened era, yet recently I see just how frail is that protective veneer. It saddens me, so when I finished this book last week it left me in something of a foreboding gloom. I’ve always had a high tolerance for literary violence and strong subjects, as I want to face what’s really out there and hiding makes me even more anxious (think of the opening scene of Apocalypse Now – that’s the mindset). So I don’t regret reading this, in fact I welcome the anger and anxiety it evokes. My reading buddy at work loves history and I haven’t yet convinced him (but I will) that great fiction is more “real” than facts / opinions. Sophie’s Choice is a great example of this: It is, in a way historical fiction about the holocaust. It brings to life in excruciating, sometimes excessively; detail what happened in Poland, Germany and America during and just after the Second World War. I have to believe this is largely autobiographical, reading about Styron’s life.

The book is big and messy, and Styron’s craft for storytelling, while jarringly dramatic, is not what one might consider skillful. I felt this way about Melville’s great work, that he had it in him and he just had to get it all out. I would guess this is Styron’s magnum opus, written later in life. 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. What Styron does exceptionally well, is bring the reader along with Stingo’s voyage of discovery, as he finds the truth is deeper, much/much deeper, than he could possibly even imagine. It is an awakening, and told through the narrator’s voice (one I could relate to, being raised on a farm in Kansas), was affecting. At over 600 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 1930s), actual people in Auschwitz and Treblinka and Birkenau. The character sketches were nuanced, exquisitely detailed, and some of the deepest and most interesting I’ve read in fiction. Some interludes stretched the limits of credulity, but for me this was a minor flaw against a rich, majestic story. This book made me want to go back and read more and more deeply about what happened in Europe in the 1930s – I’m still stymied how it happened, the intersection of economic hardship, the fallout from WW1 decisions, and the freaky coincidence of factors that created the appetite for the murder of millions of people across Europe (and after, of course, it continues). 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.

The big reveal comes late, for Sophie (most of you probably know what it is), but her lover Nathan’s issues are at least as interesting for me. I actually think I diagnosed his conditions independent of the authors (this was published in 1979, but I suspect he was writing it for at least a decade). I’m pretty sure Nathan “had” bipolar disorder, not paranoid schizophrenia (as told by the brother to Stingo in the late part of the book). Nonetheless, his mental deterioration and excessive use of stimulants, led to Nathan’s terrifying swings and abject horror of coming “down”, leading to much of the cruelty he foists on Stingo and the shockingly violent degradation of his one true love, Sophie. Stingo’s discoveries are the heart of the book, along with his frustrated sexuality, and telling the story from this point of view is the genius of Styron. 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. He throws in a lot of foreign language from Sophie (French, Polish, German) along with the broken English, which added nice color and authenticity even if one doesn’t know the language.

I was actually glad to have seen the movie (usually I’m not) as it was so exceptional and peeked my interest in the author and story. The movie was just so exceptional. Usually I dislike seeing the movie first since I can’t get the actors faces out of my mind (it difficult in this case too). 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 1982 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). ...more

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Aug 13, 2018 Dan rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: national-book-award-fiction, 6-star-fiction-books, le-monde-100-books-of-the-century

Alright I am very late to the party in reading this classic.

Sophie’s Choice is quite simply a masterpiece and Styron’s command of prose here is unsurpassed. There are quite literally hundreds of lines that were perfectly rendered.

I have added Sophie’s Choice to my six star fiction bookshelf, an homage to the great books.

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Mar 24, 2011 William2 rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: us, 20-ce, fiction, genocide

I've read it twice, maybe three times. I hope to read it again someday. ...more

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Oct 28, 2011 Moses Kilolo rated it it was amazing · 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 humanity, ...more

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May 15, 2011 Erika rated it did not like it · review of another edition

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 ...more

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Sep 28, 2010 Nadine Doolittle rated it did not like it · review of another edition

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) ...more

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Aug 31, 2008 Nathan Oates rated it it was amazing · 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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Feb 28, 2017 Marquise rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Shelves: excess-of-sentimentality, world-war-ii, historical-setting-1900s, so-verbose-and-meandering, the-curse-of-plot-predictability, contemporary-fiction, hugely-disappointing, needs-an-editorial-red-pen, set-in-multiple-periods, author-to-never-read-again

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 ...more

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Oct 13, 2012 Thomas rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: historical-fiction, read-for-high-school, five-stars

Sophie's Choice revolves around three characters and three story lines. The protagonist, Stingo, is an aspiring writer from the South who stumbles upon Sophie and Nathan when moving into his apartment in New York. Sophie serves as the beautiful and damaged love interest, a Polish woman and a survivor of Auschwitz, a Nazi concentration camp. Nathan, a handsome and successful biologist, brings both darkness and light into their lives. Stingo's journey as an individual and a writer, Sophie's troubl Sophie's Choice revolves around three characters and three story lines. The protagonist, Stingo, is an aspiring writer from the South who stumbles upon Sophie and Nathan when moving into his apartment in New York. Sophie serves as the beautiful and damaged love interest, a Polish woman and a survivor of Auschwitz, a Nazi concentration camp. Nathan, a handsome and successful biologist, brings both darkness and light into their lives. Stingo's journey as an individual and a writer, Sophie's troubled past, and Sophie and Nathan's tumultuous relationship all come together in a convoluted, intensely passionate triangle that will break readers' hearts.

This was my first time reading Styron. While his writing was not as superb in the literary sense as that of other authors, his prose conveyed all of the emotion essential to the story. Sophie's Choice reads like an addictive drama, sucking people in and slowly latching onto their hearts - and at the end, all heck breaks loose.

The development of the characters and the conflict amazed me as well. This book reminded me of Wuthering Heights, as Styron masterfully manipulated the narration and the timeline of events by using flashbacks. This allowed him to foreshadow certain occurrences and keep other revelations secret.

One minor issue I had while reading was the amount of sex. I understand that Styron included it to portray the mindset of a twenty-something-year-old man and to incorporate humor into his work, but at times it felt gratuitous. The book could have been more concise and effective if someone had eliminated some of Stingo's sexual thoughts and explorations.

However, I would recommend Sophie's Choice to everybody because of how beautifully and powerfully Styron tackled themes like oppression, mental illness, abusive relationships, etc. Get ready to cry, or at least feel serious heartbreak when you reach the end. It speaks to the evil mankind is capable of, for anyone to have to make anything similar to Sophie's choice.

*review cross-posted on my blog, the quiet voice. ...more

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Oct 27, 2009 Laurel rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, historical-fiction, classics

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 incredibly 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 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 incredibly 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 who is 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 have barely 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 instead simply say that the emotions stirred from its telling are just as intense and heart wrenching as the film.

This book is full of volatile, raw emotion and is difficult to get through at times. However, while lengthy and flawed, I found that the compassion and humanity felt throughout made it a worthwhile and very moving read. ...more

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About William Styron

William Styron

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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?” — 140 likes

“This was not judgment day - only morning. Morning: excellent and fair.” — 28 likes

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