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Loading... Sophie's Choice (1979)by William Styron
   Best Historical Fiction (177) » 30 more 501 Must-Read Books (151) Favourite Books (356) Women in War (40) A Novel Cure (220) Books That Made Me Cry (177) War Literature (74) No current Talk conversations about this book. I'd like to read this book again. If I can take it...... (  ) bcrowl399 | Jun 29, 2020 |  20 years after reading this novel I am still thinking about it. Today I read a quote from Jean Vanier, of L'Arche, which illuminates one of the principal visual lessons which I carried away from the movie. Pretending We all want to turn away from anything that reveals the failure, pain, sickness and death beneath the brightly painted surface of our ordered lives. Civilization is, at least in part, about pretending that things are better than they are. We all want to be in a happy place, where everyone is nice and good and can fend for themselves. We shun our own weakness and the weakness of others. We refuse to listen to the cry of the needy. How easy it is to fall into the illusion of a beautiful world when we have lost trust in our capacity to make of our broken world a place that can become more beautiful. Jean Vanier Source: Becoming Human ( ) MaryHeleneMele | May 7, 2019 | a story "told through the eyes of a young aspiring writer from the South, about a Polish Catholic survivor of Auschwitz and her brilliant but psychotic Jewish lover in postwar Brooklyn".[2]  brendanus | Oct 14, 2018 | Abandoned. Bored to tears. Not interested in Stingo's sex life. MelissaLenhardt | Mar 12, 2018 | This book definitely starts out horribly slow and uninteresting. The narrator, whom we know as "Stingo", is a young writer obsessed with becoming successful when he moves to New York and first encounters Sophie and Nathan. The beginning certainly dragged a ton and made me really dislike both Stingo and Nathan and feel nothing but a low level of pity for Sophie. When we finally get into the meat of the story and start getting more info on Sophie herself is when the story finally becomes interesting and had me invested in the outcome of the characters, although I never truly got to like Stingo. The ending was a bit predictable, but I still felt myself get a little choked up at it. Overall, I would probably give this book closer to a 2 and a half stars because I could have done without all the crap about Stingo and his worries and problems. He was an extraordinarily dull character. Nathan was interesting, but he aggravated me to no end. Sophie is obviously the star of this piece. I felt so horribly bad for her, but at the same time I wanted to slap her for the constant bad decisions she would make. (  ) Moore31 | Feb 25, 2018 |
 Evoking a period just after the end of that War, the novel deals with themes so plangent and painful, particularly Sophie’s experiences in the Holocaust, that the book becomes an important meditation on the effects of war on the individual consciousness.  More than once in this smugly autobiographical novel, Styron pouts about how his last book, The Confessions of Nat Turner, drew accusations of exploitation, accusations that "I had turned to my own profit and advantage the miseries of slavery." And Sophie's Choice will probably draw similar accusations about Styron's use of the Holocaust: his new novel often seems to be a strong but skin-deep psychosexual melodrama that's been artificially heaped with import by making one of the characters--Sophie--a concentration-camp survivor. In "Sophie's Choice," his first novel in 11 years, you will participate in his greatest risks to date, both in structure and theme. Within the context of a single Brooklyn sum- mer, the summer of 1947, in which the autobiog- figure and narrator, Stingo, sets out to write the "dark Tidewater fable" that will be- come "Lie Down in Darkness," Styron will set himself the task of trying to understand what he calls "the central issue" of the 20th Century: the embodiment of evil that was Auschwitz. And how does a 22-year-old Southerner, just fired from his job as a junior editor at McGraw Hill, with literary aspirations and in robust health, connect even remotely with Auschwitz? In 1947? Belongs to Publisher Series
Stingo, a young southerner, who journeyed north in 1947 to become a writer becomes intellectually and emotionally 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. No library descriptions found. |
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