This Thanksgiving I am thankful for holiday weekends with extra days off where I don't have to do work, and while I have other "stuff" I could be doing around the house, instead, I can opt to do nothing but read a book all day. It's a luxury that I relish and don't do nearly often enough.
So I devoured almost 200 pages of Sophie's Choice yesterday. Confession: while I have never seen the movie of Sophie's Choice, I kind of had an inkling what her actual "choice" was all about. There have been enough references to it in pop culture that I kind of picked up on these (I'm looking at you Friends). However, in reading William Styron's work, he does a brilliant job of concealing the titular decision. The entire time, the reader is waiting for what the choice could be, and you don't see it coming at all. The way he tells Sophie's history keeps the reader guessing.
As a background, the story is about Stingo, a young Southerner who moves to New York to become a writer. He ends up living in a boarding house in Brooklyn where he meets Sophie, a gorgeous Polish immigrant, and Nathan, Sophie's lover who she is fanatically attached to and who is a magnetic and brilliant but domineering man. The 3 of them strike up a close friendship, where Stingo falls madly in love with Sophie but adores their companionship and understands the implausibility of Sophie ever loving him (due to her obsession and adoration of Nathan).
The story contrasts the telling of the trio's time together in New York with that of Sophie's history, which she reveals to Stingo a little at a time, often in drunken moments. Sophie was a Christian Pole who survived (just barely) in Auschwitz for 18 months. We learn all about her circumstances for getting there, her father and how he impacted her growing up, her time spent at Auschwitz, and her children. What is fascinating about how Styron tells Sophie's story, is that as the book progresses and you learn more and more about her history, she is constantly admitting to Stingo that she has lied about previous details. Many of these details are big ticket lies too (for example, her father being murdered by the Nazis defending the lives of Jews vs her father writing a pamphlet outlining why and how Jews should be exterminated). So her story is constantly being revised as the novel goes on and after a while, I couldn't help questioning her reliability all together. Is the final version of her story the "real" version or is it the one that she can accept Stingo knowing?
At the same time Sophie's story is being unfolded, we learn of the ongoing relationship between Sophie and Nathan, who have a passionate but dysfunctional relationship, with Nathan being a drug-addicted, maniacal individual who occasionally flies off into rages where he physically and mentally abuses Sophie and accuses her of cheating on him.
There is so much complexity to the story and so much to consider, but there were 3 things that I couldn't stop thinking about while reading the book:
1) The horrible guilt experienced by the survivors of the Holocaust. After everything they saw and experienced, and in many cases, things they did themselves in order to survive (often at the expense of the lives of others), once everything was over and done with, how do they reconcile that guilt? How do they live with themselves knowing that they survived and others didn't? How to they come to terms with knowing that they did some potentially horrible things at the requirement of their captors? Do they ever really recover? Do they ever feel as though they deserve happiness after that? All of these questions are the hallmark of Sophie's struggle. She finds herself in America a couple years after leaving Auschwitz, and all of the things she experiences couldn't be more of a contrast to her time there (she loves music, food, drinking which can be done in abundance here). Her character epitomizes passion - for Nathan, for sex, for life. But as she tells her story more and more, she seems to become more and more unhinged (as evidenced by her non-stop drinking) and the guilt becomes unbearable for her.
2) The role of religion in what was occurred during the Holocaust. The most significant of the statements in the book pertaining to this coming at the very end: "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?'". The questions of religion and morality exist for all 3 characters, particularly for Sophie. She clearly has abandoned God (or, more appropriately, she feels that God has abandoned her) in spite of her Catholic upbringing, but there are some significant moments where her belief in God affects outcomes for her (particularly at the moment of her "choice"). Anti-Semitism also plays a huge role in the book, obviously as part of the historical context of the Nazis and the Holocaust, but also as a struggle for Sophie (she despises her father's opinions on the extermination of Jews, expresses indifference for the Jewish ghetto in Cracow, but at a drunken moment admits how much she hates the Jews. I got the impression though that this statement wasn't honest, it was more her misplacing blame for what she experienced at Asuchwitz and lashing out at Nathan for his desertion of her). But talk about heavy duty stuff. But isn't it though? All of the events occurring in the name of religion specific to the Holocaust?
3) Which brings me to #3. The absolute horrors and evil that we humans are capable of, as evidenced by what was done during Nazi Germany. It's not that this is a revolutionary thought or anything, but when faced with the events in detail, I just regress to the basic question of "How?". How does this kind of evil become pervasive enough to allow the slaughter of 11 million people? How can that many people share the same horrible desires to enact the kinds of terrible things that were done? How can power allow for that kind of evil to murder others on such a scale? There are a lot of details in the novel about the specifics of Auschwitz and Nazi Germany (from the logistics of the camp regarding slave labor vs immediate death, to the specifics of the crematoriums, to the historical context of the Final Solution), which I can only assume are true (I didn't look up every detail, but I would imagine that Styron did his homework). And it's as though I can't even wrap my mind around it. That only 70 years ago, in a modern, industrial, "civilized" country, that something this horrific occurred. And I realize that there are horrible acts that occur on a regular basis in this world akin to what happened during this time. I'm not negating that evil persists today in just as terrible a form, but maybe it's the scale of it or the amount of detail that is known about the Holocaust today that just makes it seem so unfathomable. That kind of evil just doesn't compute in my brain somehow.
So overall, this book was fantastic. While my recap here is rather depressing and bleak, the story didn't feel quite that soul-crushing while reading, but maybe just felt that way in totality after reading. There were so many fantastic things that Styron did (they dynamic of the narration and how he often would "break" from telling the story while happening to telling the story long after it occurred, the foreshadowing, the qualities of each character) that just made everything about this book an excellent read. I CANNOT WAIT to watch the movie. I'm sure I'll have to make that happen before the weekend is over. I would highly recommend reading the book though. There's lots of good stuff packed on those pages.
So off next to The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers. I still have ~ 2 days left of a long weekend...maybe I'll do some damage on this book before the weekend is over.
237 left. Happy Saturday!
PS. I have slightly fixed access to the full lists of books in the right margin. You are now able to access the lists without having to login to a website. There are still a few more clicks involved than I would like, and I'm not certain how long this site will host the document, but I'll test it out for a while and see if it meets my needs...
