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3.86 AVERAGE
3.86 AVERAGE
A great story, but overlong and florid, in my opinion. There are too many chapters where Stingo, the narrator, stops the action to tell a bit more of Sophie's back story. It would have been better if it was condensed. The movie handled this better, I think.
I think this book is highly overrated. None of the characters are that likable except maybe Sophie and at times even she is annoying. It dragged on and the narrator is misogynistic. The climax was a disappointment. Definitely better WW2 themed books to read
Way to make the suffering of millions of people about a white guy and his tumescence.
I liked the prose and the way that the story unfolded, but I couldn't get over the author stand-in character--his entitlement to the bodies of women and bitterness over lack of access to them. I almost would have bought that there was some really high-level meta-irony going on if it weren't for the earnest maudlin passage that closes the book.
I liked the prose and the way that the story unfolded, but I couldn't get over the author stand-in character--his entitlement to the bodies of women and bitterness over lack of access to them. I almost would have bought that there was some really high-level meta-irony going on if it weren't for the earnest maudlin passage that closes the book.
challenging
dark
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
challenging
dark
informative
sad
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
My review cannot even begin to give this masterpiece the credit it deserves. It's a modern epic; a beautiful tribute to the millions of souls who suffered during the Holocaust.
The plot of this story is so intricate; yet the author manages not to confuse the reader with the various plot twists and turns. The story is beautifully written; each character filled with heart-breaking agony. The author tackles so many issues; obviously the Holocaust, but also mental illness, racism, the continued battle between the North and the South, alcoholism, religion....the list is unending.
"Sophie's Choice" is heart-breaking. To have to choose which child to "save" and which child to send to certain death. Sophie must have been absolutely tortured by the consequences of her choice. She knows without a doubt that her daughter Eva is dead. But the fate of her son, Jan, is forever unknown. Would it have been "kinder" for her to have let the doctor send both of her children to the gas chamber that day? Perhaps; Jan no doubt suffered terribly in the concentration camp. But did he survive? Was her choice a good one?
And what of the relationship between Sophie and Nathan? Their attachment to one another seems inexplicable, but they cling to one another. Their relationship is the most explosive relationship I've ever read about; the author did an incredible job of painting their obsession with one another.
The plot of this story is so intricate; yet the author manages not to confuse the reader with the various plot twists and turns. The story is beautifully written; each character filled with heart-breaking agony. The author tackles so many issues; obviously the Holocaust, but also mental illness, racism, the continued battle between the North and the South, alcoholism, religion....the list is unending.
"Sophie's Choice" is heart-breaking. To have to choose which child to "save" and which child to send to certain death. Sophie must have been absolutely tortured by the consequences of her choice. She knows without a doubt that her daughter Eva is dead. But the fate of her son, Jan, is forever unknown. Would it have been "kinder" for her to have let the doctor send both of her children to the gas chamber that day? Perhaps; Jan no doubt suffered terribly in the concentration camp. But did he survive? Was her choice a good one?
And what of the relationship between Sophie and Nathan? Their attachment to one another seems inexplicable, but they cling to one another. Their relationship is the most explosive relationship I've ever read about; the author did an incredible job of painting their obsession with one another.
Overall, I thought this was a well written book with some great prose throughout. However, I was disappointed by the amount of detail that was put into describing certain things such as Stingo's blossoming sexuality while the more important topics(i.e. Sophie's actual choice) were mulled over quickly and without much thought. I found myself getting frustrated throughout the book because of the unending detail and how long it took to get to the point. I honestly skimmed over some pages that just didn't add to the plot.
More reviews available at my blog, Beauty and the Bookworm.
Ugh, what a tedious book. I read this because a) it's supposedly a classic and b) it's on the ALA's banned books list, which means it qualifies for one of my reading challenge categories. Again, I can see why it was banned: because it involves tons of talk of sex, and the people who like to ban books are terrified of sex. Also it was apparently banned in Poland because it highlights how anti-Semitic that country was?
Anyway. The main story here is about struggling writer Stingo, who ends up living in a boarding house where the titular Sophie and her lover, Nathan, also live. While Stingo tries to write a great Southern novel, he gets tangled up in Sophie and Nathan's disastrous love affair and learns about Sophie's past in Poland during World War II, including her time in Auschwitz.
Stingo is pretty clearly Styron; not a literal version of Styron, but he wants to write about all the same things Styron writes about and Styron uses him to shove his own philosophy about slavery and concentration camps and whatever down our throats. This is especially easy for him because Stingo is the narrator. I basically hated Stingo. He was so boring and pretentious and all he ever thought about was getting laid. I didn't care about him at all and the best parts of the book were when he was "narrating" Sophie's story, because those parts actually read as normal third-person narration for the most part rather than Stingo's pretentious rambling.
Sophie is someone that everyone falls in love with right away because she's hawt. No other reason. This is sad, because I think there were other reasons to love Sophie--but none of the characters actually like her because of them. Her personal story is deep and moving, and is the story of a non-Jewish inmate of Auschwitz. She apparently knows how to love unconditionally, given her feelings for Nathan despite his abysmal treatment of her, though some of this is probably her clinging to something that seems stable (even if it's not) after the previous turmoil of her life. The thing I didn't like about Sophie is that she is an unreliable narrator. She's told everyone different versions of her story with different details revealed. Stingo purports to have the true version, but how can we really know? All of these lies and contradictory revelations that Sophie puts out kind of made me doubt her larger story as a whole, which really isn't something that I think was supposed to happen.
Other problematic things about this include how Nathan's mental illness is portrayed. He's very clearly unstable from the beginning of the book, but I don't know...something about how Styron tied his (unknown to everyone else until late in the book) diagnosis into his behaviors and used it to just excuse away his behavior seems...not good. I mean, people with mental illnesses are not dangerous as a rule, and Nathan very clearly was from the very start.
Overall, though, the book just dragged. I like the parts with Sophie's story, but I knew the ending of that before I started, and so it didn't come as a big, heart-wrenching, shocking moment for me. Stingo I absolutely hated. (Did I mention he sexually assaults someone? They're making out and once he realizes she doesn't want to have sex, he decides to just whip it out and try to get a handjob out of her, even though it's been made pretty clear from her reactions that she's not into it.) The non-Sophie parts dragged, and I didn't want to read about Styron's philosophy at all. This was tedious all over, and I'm glad to have it over with.
2 stars out of 5.
Ugh, what a tedious book. I read this because a) it's supposedly a classic and b) it's on the ALA's banned books list, which means it qualifies for one of my reading challenge categories. Again, I can see why it was banned: because it involves tons of talk of sex, and the people who like to ban books are terrified of sex. Also it was apparently banned in Poland because it highlights how anti-Semitic that country was?
Anyway. The main story here is about struggling writer Stingo, who ends up living in a boarding house where the titular Sophie and her lover, Nathan, also live. While Stingo tries to write a great Southern novel, he gets tangled up in Sophie and Nathan's disastrous love affair and learns about Sophie's past in Poland during World War II, including her time in Auschwitz.
Stingo is pretty clearly Styron; not a literal version of Styron, but he wants to write about all the same things Styron writes about and Styron uses him to shove his own philosophy about slavery and concentration camps and whatever down our throats. This is especially easy for him because Stingo is the narrator. I basically hated Stingo. He was so boring and pretentious and all he ever thought about was getting laid. I didn't care about him at all and the best parts of the book were when he was "narrating" Sophie's story, because those parts actually read as normal third-person narration for the most part rather than Stingo's pretentious rambling.
Sophie is someone that everyone falls in love with right away because she's hawt. No other reason. This is sad, because I think there were other reasons to love Sophie--but none of the characters actually like her because of them. Her personal story is deep and moving, and is the story of a non-Jewish inmate of Auschwitz. She apparently knows how to love unconditionally, given her feelings for Nathan despite his abysmal treatment of her, though some of this is probably her clinging to something that seems stable (even if it's not) after the previous turmoil of her life. The thing I didn't like about Sophie is that she is an unreliable narrator. She's told everyone different versions of her story with different details revealed. Stingo purports to have the true version, but how can we really know? All of these lies and contradictory revelations that Sophie puts out kind of made me doubt her larger story as a whole, which really isn't something that I think was supposed to happen.
Other problematic things about this include how Nathan's mental illness is portrayed. He's very clearly unstable from the beginning of the book, but I don't know...something about how Styron tied his (unknown to everyone else until late in the book) diagnosis into his behaviors and used it to just excuse away his behavior seems...not good. I mean, people with mental illnesses are not dangerous as a rule, and Nathan very clearly was from the very start.
Overall, though, the book just dragged. I like the parts with Sophie's story, but I knew the ending of that before I started, and so it didn't come as a big, heart-wrenching, shocking moment for me. Stingo I absolutely hated. (Did I mention he sexually assaults someone? They're making out and once he realizes she doesn't want to have sex, he decides to just whip it out and try to get a handjob out of her, even though it's been made pretty clear from her reactions that she's not into it.) The non-Sophie parts dragged, and I didn't want to read about Styron's philosophy at all. This was tedious all over, and I'm glad to have it over with.
2 stars out of 5.
I was desperately sad and unnerved as I read this but in the end, I didn't fall in love with it. A different and innovative way of recollecting the horrors of the Final Solution (and the vortex of destruction it spread through other populations as well) and Sophie, in her "cowardice" and her attempts to simply skate by and to try and survive was a real and more vivid character than normal. Self-destructive and unwilling to let herself live with the past, in the end, she succumbs. I preferred "Lie Down in Darkness", Styron seems to drag on here. Will try "Confessions of Nat Turner" next.