|
Loading... Sophie's Choice (1979)by William Styron
   Best Historical Fiction (177) » 31 more 501 Must-Read Books (151) Favourite Books (346) Women in War (40) A Novel Cure (200) Books That Made Me Cry (177) Top War Literature (73) No current Talk conversations about this book. I'd like to read this book again. If I can take it...... (  ) bcrowl399 | Jun 28, 2020 |  2 kristi_test_02 | Jun 16, 2020 | 2 kristi_test_02 | Jun 16, 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 6, 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 13, 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
References to this work on external resources.
|
 Google Books — Loading...Popular coversRatingAverage: (4.14)
Is this you?Become a LibraryThing Author. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
2
Wikipedia in English
4