A Survivor's Guilt. Review on Sophie's Choice - William Styron

A story set against the background of pre-war Poland, the Holocaust and post-war New York, Sophie's Choice is one of those books that stays with you long after you have read it. A bold, substantial novel, with serious tragic themes and a riveting story.

Recounting a breathtaking personal drama during The Holocaust, exploring the human dimension of the historical nightmare Sophie’s Choice illustrates the development of the friendship between the narrator Stingo, a young struggling writer in 1947 New York, with Sophie Zawistowska a Polish refugee survivor of the concentration camps during World War II, and her boyfriend Nathan, a local Jewish man. Sophie narrates to Stingo the various tough and inhuman decisions she had to make for survival.

William Styron’s narration would bind any reader once and for all, with its ever-tightening noose with every passing chapter. Never once does the pace flag, even when jumping randomly and frequently between the near past, the present and the far past of its protagonists. The tragic novel is sweeping yet, doesn't drag. Deftly narrated flashbacks reveal Sophie's childhood in pre-war Krakow, her time in the Auschwitz concentration camp and her stormy relationship with the now loving now dangerous Nathan. Her past unfolds slowly, events that shaped her childhood, horrors she experienced during war & her overwhelming sense of guilt at surviving. Her final ‘Choice’, possibly the most difficult one a human would ever have to make, torments Sophie for the rest of her life, never being given the opportunity to grieve properly her ‘Choice’.

The subject is not a very pleasant or a happy one - man's immense evil; the vast scale of human suffering during the war; the intense overwhelming guilt and destructive madness of its main protagonists. Through the 680 odd pages of Sophie’s Choice let yourself be enthralled by:-

# Carnal, repressed desires and unspoken longing a man feels for a woman who so clearly is not meant to be his. The longing growing more and more besotted as more time is spent with her, while she is only too engrossed recounting the beginnings, the progressions of her passionate, no-holds barred love affair with the man she loves.

# Desolate loneliness making one befriend absolute strangers, and discovering their shocking lives and past as layer after layer is removed, gradually becoming aware of the shadows that surround them.

# The Holocaust and its horrors, and frequent echoes of the oppression that occurred in the American South against blacks.

# How personal grief and depression are a lot more complicated than anyone would like to imagine.

# The consequences of bottling up emotions displayed with both of the characters of Sophie and Nathan. The past stresses for one and the other’s running away from problems that are undeniably a part of him, Sophie and Nathan are examples of what happens when people allow grief and societal pressures to overcome human nature.

Schizophrenia, Anger, Drug addiction, suicide, mental illness and affliction and bearing of violence within a loving relation, all make Sophies Choice a deeply disturbing read. Guilt and the factors that lead a person to choosing death over life are intricately explored.

It is not an uplifting book, and anyone seeking a happy story should rather avoid it. Otherwise, Simply not to be missed

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