I agree with those reviewers who think that this novel is too long, and overloaded with sexual themes (review based on 1979 edition). Other than that, let's focus on matters not developed by other reviewers.

The Polish-Catholic nationalist Endeks (Endecks), as embodied by Sophie's father Professor Bieganski, are mis-portrayed as a Nazi, or quasi-Nazi, movement. (p. 223, 237, 239-243, 248, etc.). The ONR (O.N.R.) is misrepresented as a collaborationist outfit. (p. 471). Styron's obsession with Polish anti-Semitism goes as far as attributing to a character the statement that the Poles "practically invented anti-Semitism". (p. 472). Quite an inventive people, those Poles! In actuality, Jews were just as prejudiced against Poles as Poles were against Jews, if not more so. Real or imagined Polish hatred against Jews is condemned; never the reverse.

Styron viewpoint is that of a far left-winger critiquing the American South, and not strictly that of a Judeocentrist. His leading character, Sophie, is a Polish Catholic victim of Auschwitz. There are many allusions to Polish suffering at the hands of the Nazis, but these always come back to a Judeo-referential mindset. He finds parallels with Polish romanticism and aristocracy, and their Southern American counterparts, yet clearly realizes that Poland suffered much more from losing wars than did the South. (p. 247).

Styron's character compares the experiences of American blacks to that of Polish Jews. (e. g., p. 328). This is ridiculous. Blacks came by force (in chains), were slaves with no rights, did menial labor, were mostly poor, and were at the very bottom of society. Jews came to Poland voluntarily, served as traders, were largely exempt from the menial labor of the Polish masses, and--as middlemen situated between the nobility-few and the peasant-majority, enjoyed more rights and privileges than most Poles. Even with the discriminatory practices of the 1930's, enacted to reduce Jewish economic dominance, the average Jew remained wealthier than the average Pole. Jews were never barred from universities--to the contrary, Jews were much overrepresented in them. The later quotas restricting them were designed to reduce their representation to levels comparable to that in the general population, not to keep them out. Using modern parlance, these policies were forms of affirmative action designed to create more opportunities for Poles in Jewish-dominated endeavors. At no time in history did Poles and Jews drink from separate public fountains.

The informed reader quickly realizes that all of the major themes of SOPHIE'S CHOICE, predictably, rest upon selective historical memory. Polish anti-Semitism is emphasized, but not the Jewish particularism and disloyalty that provoked it. The hostile teachings of Christianity against Jews ("Christ killers") are mentioned (e. g., p. 255), but not the equally hostile Judaic teachings against Christ and Christianity (idolatrous worshippers of three gods, and of the Bastard Son of an Adulteress, etc.). Nor does the reader learn that some Jewish rabbis also believed that the Holocaust was God's punishment of Jewish sins.

For further elaboration on SOPHIE'S CHOICE, see the Peczkis reviews of Polish-Jewish Relations in North America (Polin Vol. 19) and William Styron's Sophie's Choice: Crime and Self-Punishment.

I'm sorry but I must disagree with most Amazon users and say that I did not enjoy this book as much as I had anticipated based on its rave reviews.

I suppose my biggest objection to the novel is its extremely pornographic nature. Does the reader really need to know the details of Stingo's every sexual encounter? Does it further the plot in any way? No. If anything, these scenes detract from the plot and unnecessarily add more pages to an already lengthy book. And unfortunately we are forced to read about Sophie's tragic tale - a truly moving story about human reactions to pure evil, and the effects of the past on the present - through the narrative of a horny, immature 22-year-old.

Based on its title, I was disappointed to find that this book was mostly about Stingo, not Sophie. I do appreciate that Styron was using a different "path", so to say, to lead readers to the climax - Sophie's choice - but the story took too many detours. And once I had finally reached the pinnacle of the plot, I couldn't help but think, "That's it? That's how he ends it?" After all, I had read over 500 pages, enduring the dull or otherwise vulgar ramblings of Stingo, to slowly piece together Sophie's mysterious past, only to be left with one page describing the actual "choice." Its abruptness left me disappointed.

I may have enjoyed this book more had I not held such different expectations before starting it. Readers should be warned that this is a very adult book that does not directly tell Sophie's story. This novel also features explicit language (the f-word, the c-word, the k-word, etc.) that greatly surprised a prude such as myself. ;)

Sophie's story itself is harrowing and brilliant because it reminds us that no one - not even victims - are perfect, and that we must live with the consequences of our choices (sometimes even years later). I truly enjoyed the parts of Sophie's flashback, and I only wish that they were told from a different perspective, perhaps from someone less hormonal.

This book is on the Modern Library's Top 100 List. I thought the overall story was good, and for the most part I enjoyed reading this novel. I did not enjoy the vulgarity used throughout the book, I think the use of the F-word and the C-word, make any novel trashy. I also dislike how certain aspects of the book seem to be arbitrarily and capriciously thrown into the story that overall ends up losing a lot of the power the narrative portrays. It's cheesy at times. I also think Styron could have done without a lot of the lengthy description. As a novel, it could have been much better and much more powerful if more was left out. For example, other than the sex scene with Sophie and Stingo at the end, (which could have been much more romantically portrayed) all of Stingo's sexual fantasies and escapades should be left out. It's not relevent to his turbulent relationship with Sophie and Nathan, which is what made the story what it is.

Other than that, the whole tale of Sophie and her survival in the concentration camp is what makes this book worth reading. This is a very powerful portrayal of the tragedy that befell so many helpless victims. It also goes to show how evil statism can be. To think of so many people being slaughtered makes my stomach turn and tears well up in my eyes. To watch the people that you love and even strangers be sent to their deaths like cattle, it almost seems unreal that it ever happened.

It's understandable in the end why Sophie made so many bad choices, and it's also unquestionably tragic.

Sophie's choice is a very engrossing novel, well written and poetic. The momentum towards the core of the novel, i.e. Sophie's choice, is masterfully built. But I felt very let down about the fact that Styron does not go into a more detailed analysis of Sophie's decision as he does with the man who compelled her to choose. Part of what made the novel unputdownable was that Styron entices the reader with promises of fascinating and shocking revelations throughout the novel. However, every time the revelations came, I felt disappointed with the banality of each of them. Styron is good at building anticipation but he doesn't deliver or satisfy.... kind of like Leslie and Mary Alice who tease him mercilessly causing frustration and anguish rather than fulfillment. I give this novel a B.

No spoilers.

I will not offer here a summary of this book, because clearly that has been done before by other reviewers; I will simply briefly state my opinions of Sophie's Choice.

If, by some chance, you are just now coming across this novel, I am jealous of you because you are ignorant of just how engrossed you are about to become in the story and lives of Syron's characters. This novel, at various times, either made me smile with delight, or had my mouth wide open with shock. Sophie's story is one that is almost too complicated to put down on paper, but, fortunately for us readers, Styron is able to do so masterfully.

Having known the goings on of the novel before actually reading it, I found it just a tad (and seriously, only a tad) bit slow in the beginning, but once Syron dove into the telling of Sophie's past, I simply could not put it down. Please do yourself a favor if you are a fan of high-quality writing with a fully-engrossing story to supplement it and read this RIGHT NOW.

Sophie's Choice (Modern Library)
Outstanding piece of literature.
Somehow It makes me believe that a great portion of this accomplishment is not fiction at all, but a real life story with characters that get so much into the deepest inner self of the reader inciting him to not want to stop reading.
There are three aspects of this production extraordinarily remarkable:
Firstly, the use of great prose and vocabulary. Styron plays with words to conceive the greatest work of description I have read.
Secondly, all the details of the horrendous, not forgivable, indescribable, examples of crimes executed during the Holocaust. Specifically in Auschwitz, Birkenau concentration camps, with its crematory installations, and of the way some polish people acted, and so many of them also died, leads me to believe that 100% of the facts did occur as utterly wrong as Styron relates them. This seems no fiction but reality
And last but not least, Sophie, the beautiful, fair, polish woman that relates her story during those years. She relates her life intermittently positioning lies between true events all throughout this piece of literature.
And almost at the end relates how she is imminently condemned to take the most hideous choice of her life. The one that leads her to the most shaking end .
To closure my summary, I shouldn't fail to convey that the idiosyncrasies of the personalities are anything but conventional, and the narration, done by the young and naive writer Stingo, whose life seems to be a self-portrayal of Willian Styron himself.
No wonder it has earned a National Price Award.
Please anyone send me suggestions about other Titles as good as this

I was reluctant to pick up this book because of the depressing nature of the story but Styron was able to express the joy of simply being alive despite the harsh realities of our world. The characters are all sublimely passionate and have stayed with me for 15 years.

The writing is so rich that it verges on poetry. Every word is well chosen and thoughtful. I often thought of Faulkner as I was reading this and was shocked to realize that Styron easily holds his weight in comparison. Sophie's Choice is a true masterpiece of western literature.

One word of caution though, if you saw the movie and thought this might be a good page turner you will be dissapointed. This is a work of sophisticated muli-layered literature and is by no means an "easy read".

Framing "Sophie's Choice" is the story of Stingo, a 22-year-old Southerner who arrives in New York and hopes, like so many of his fellow transplants, to become a famous writer--and, not incidentally, to lose his virginity. In Styron's hands, Stingo's tale is thinly disguised autobiography, describing a young man working for McGraw-Hill as an editor, under the supervision of the Weasel, "a near-anagram of his actual surname"--that is, for the unnamed Edward Aswell, who had been "Thomas Wolfe's editor after he left Scribner and Maxwell Perkins." (Styron's portrait of Aswell, a washed-up company man leeching off Wolfe's legacy, is delightfully catty and a little cruel, perhaps deservedly.) In his new job, Stingo rejects nearly every manuscript that crosses his desk, including the "long, solemn and tedious Pacific voyage" that would later become, for another publisher, the multimillion-selling "Kon-Tiki."

The fictional Stingo, like Styron, will go on to write two novels about a Virginian woman suffering from depression ("Lie Down in Darkness") and about slavery ("Confessions of Nat Turner"). The presence of these two novels is not gratuitous; they provide parallels that help Stingo, in his imagined middle age, understand both Sophie, a Polish Catholic who lives through Auschwitz and arrives in New York with the barely suppressed burden of survivor's guilt, and her manic-depressive lover Nathan. In effect, "Sophie's Choice" is really part of a triptych of psychological novels dealing with depression, oppression, and the nature of evil.

In the same way that Stingo's story is suffused with elements of nonfiction, Sophie's biography is haunted by the presence of historical figures--above all by Rudolph Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz. While the novel revolves around Sophie's secret past and the horrific, climactic unveiling of her infamous choice--and that is certainly what most readers will take away from the book--Styron examines these events through the analyses of a number of post-Holocaust commentators; in other words, the fictional Stingo researches and summarizes the studies of real-life scholars to place the novel in its historical context. For example, Hoess's portrait, supplemented by excerpts from his actual diaries, is viewed through his submission to the "banality of evil" (as articulated by Simone Weil and Hannah Arrendt), especially how he attempted to recast himself as a casualty--a man who suffered as much as his victims because he was forced to carry out orders. ("I had to see everything.... My pity was so great that I longed to vanish from the scene: yet I might not show the slightest trace of emotion.")

The result is a powerful blend of history and imagination. Yet, for all its realism, its finely drawn characters, its philosophical underpinnings, and its climactic power, "Sophie's Choice," while a great novel, is not a perfect one. Styron's prose sporadically suffers from a near-Wagnerian grandiloquence that he not quite successfully, I'm afraid, tries to pass off as a young man's Southern affectations. (After all, these are supposed to be the recollections of a 50-year-old novelist, not Thomas Wolfe's post-adolescent rhapsodies.) But the occasional flourish and flabbiness could hardly overwhelm the accomplishment of Styron's truly epic masterpiece: a novel of despair, yes, but ultimately an ode to hope, "excellent and fair."

William Styron must have blindsided most everyone as his southern roots' delivery of this Eastern European story is in many ways unorthodox: Holocaust as art.

The protagonist is his alter ego - Stingo: both attended Duke, both served in World War II, both worked at McGraw-Hill, both were fired from M-H for immature acts, both became budding novelists in New York, both were infatuated and wrote novels about Nat Turner. . .

Stingo opts to live in a small rooming house where he meets Sophie Zawistowski and Nathan Landau - two lovebirds whose libido keep Stingo awake at late hours and can be so raucous as to shake Stingo's ceiling's plaster loose. A quiet place for writing it was not; a writer's paradise it was.

Over the next 550 pages, you learn some about Nathan, but the vast majority is about erotic lust for Sophie by Lingo, but more importantly you learn about the incredibly ironic and saddened life created by those who lived in perhaps the cruelest times of mankind. Ironic? - you may ask. Yes. The greatest instigator who sought to subterfuge the previously peaceful coexistence between Jews and Poles was none other than Sophie's father. Although his political philosophy may have entitled him to sainthood by the Third Reich, it ultimately was the what started the Nazi decimation of Sophie's father, husband, son and daughter.

Styron may be labeled a Southern Liberal who needs to absolve his or his forefather's sins by writing about those who are abused by petulant ingrates - either the infamous slave Nat Turner, or here the virtual Jewess Sophie. But, his intentions are good. Through thorough research and extremely edited prose - to the point where each word of each sentence appears to be perfectly placed before the next - Styron does not didactically tell us Nazis were bad. Instead, through his literary largess, he has us feel the strains and torments by those who lived and ached at Auschwitz. You feel as though you can smell the stench of the abattoir. His ability to depict these horrors - all of which I will never truly know or understand - reminds me of Upton Sinclair's magnificent description of worker's woes in "The Jungle."

Being a southerner, Styron's analogy of Europe's embarrassment of anti-Semitism to America's embarrassment of slavery is unique. It is constantly chanted, and is reflective of his extreme knowledge of each - remember this author's other greatly heralded work is the Pulitzer-Prize winning "The Confessions of Nat Turner."

Now heralded as a great novel, after having been translated in dozens of language, "Sophie's Choice" may be unparalleled. I know many sufferers of the Holocaust asked that he made too much of the genocidal times of the Holocaust - he was making art of something to which art should not reach. I understand their concern, and I disagree with their statement and suggest that forbidding books like "Sophie's Choice" would act only as censure and position Holocaust survivors in a light of stubborn illogical restraint - something they so arduously fought and overcame.

William Styron must have blindsided most everyone as his southern roots' delivery of this Eastern European story is in many ways unorthodox: Holocaust as art.

The protagonist is his alter ego - Stingo: both attended Duke, both served in World War II, both worked at McGraw-Hill, both were fired from M-H for immature acts, both became budding novelists in New York, both were infatuated and wrote novels about Nat Turner. . .

Stingo opts to live in a small rooming house where he meets Sophie Zawistowski and Nathan Landau - two lovebirds whose libido keep Stingo awake at late hours and can be so raucous as to shake Stingo's ceiling's plaster loose. A quiet place for writing it was not; a writer's paradise it was.

Over the next 550 pages, you learn some about Nathan, but the vast majority is about erotic lust for Sophie by Lingo, but more importantly you learn about the incredibly ironic and saddened life created by those who lived in perhaps the cruelest times of mankind. Ironic? - you may ask. Yes. The greatest instigator who sought to subterfuge the previously peaceful coexistence between Jews and Poles was none other than Sophie's father. Although his political philosophy may have entitled him to sainthood by the Third Reich, it ultimately was the what started the Nazi decimation of Sophie's father, husband, son and daughter.

Styron may be labeled a Southern Liberal who needs to absolve his or his forefather's sins by writing about those who are abused by petulant ingrates - either the infamous slave Nat Turner, or here the virtual Jewess Sophie. But, his intentions are good. Through thorough research and extremely edited prose - to the point where each word of each sentence appears to be perfectly placed before the next - Styron does not didactically tell us Nazis were bad. Instead, through his literary largess, he has us feel the strains and torments by those who lived and ached at Auschwitz. You feel as though you can smell the stench of the abattoir. His ability to depict these horrors - all of which I will never truly know or understand - reminds me of Upton Sinclair's magnificent description of worker's woes in "The Jungle."

Being a southerner, Styron's analogy of Europe's embarrassment of anti-Semitism to America's embarrassment of slavery is unique. It is constantly chanted, and is reflective of his extreme knowledge of each - remember this author's other greatly heralded work is the Pulitzer-Prize winning "The Confessions of Nat Turner."

Now heralded as a great novel, after having been translated in dozens of language, "Sophie's Choice" may be unparalleled. I know many sufferers of the Holocaust asked that he made too much of the genocidal times of the Holocaust - he was making art of something to which art should not reach. I understand their concern, and I disagree with their statement and suggest that forbidding books like "Sophie's Choice" would act only as censure and position Holocaust survivors in a light of stubborn illogical restraint - something they so arduously fought and overcame.

After reading memoirs and biographies of real Holocaust victims such as Elie Wiesel, Corrie Ten Boom, Alma Rose, this novel was a real disappointment. It centers around three pathetic characters, immorality, and a chicken-crap concentration camp story that is pathetic to the core.

Cut to the chase. Stingo is a hormonal 22 year old who just wants to get into someone's pants, anyone would do. He even fantasizes about raping children when he can't get his sexual obsession satisfied. He is the narrator.

Nathan is a crazy, drug-addicted, phony. One of those gifted and talented children who went off the deep end and creates havoc in other people's lives. I'd call him the catalyst.

Sophie is pure pathetic. She is so lacking that it becomes comical. Her only wish is to be a collaborator, a turncoat, a stool-pigeon, a traitor, a whore. She has no convictions, and only cares about herself. Yet it is her selfishness and lack of any noble acts during the war that leads her to her guilt and depression afterwards.

First of all, she is a daughter of a Polish professor who loves Nazi's, hates Jews, and writes pamphlets extolling the final solution. She dutifully passes out those pamphlets, and even keeps one hidden in her boots to hopefully use to her advantage. She is a coward and does not help her Polish compatriots after the German occupation even though she is fluent in German and could translate material with ease. She hopes at every turn to seduce a German and be taken into a privileged position. First she fantasizes about the German industrialist that her father entertains before his demise. Later after she is captured for stealing a piece of ham, not for being a member of the resistance, though ironically she is rounded up with them, she tries very hard to seduce the camp commandent that she does translations and secretarial work for. She produces the pamphlet in hopes of gaining an advantage only to find out that Germans think of Poles as exterminable, to be taken care of after the Jews are finished off. The commmandent is disgusted with her try at allying herself with him. And she fails to steal the radio that her compatriots could have made good use of, about her only worthwhile try. Finally she realizes that she is no better than the Jew and allows herself to be tormented and abused by Nathan, the American Jew she meets in New York after her release from the camp.

Actually Nathan is the only person who sees through Sophie, although he doesn't know the details. He berates Sophie, "what did you do to survive when others died?" On the surface he appears overly jealous and suspicious of Sophie, accusing her of having relations with the men at her work. Sophie insists to Stingo that she has been faithful to Nathan, but as the story worms its way along, you see one lie after another peeled away and exposed as a sham. Finally, the most unbelievable is that Stingo, the forever horny frat boy and Sophie, the old hag with the false teeth soaking in the Polident, have a night of fornication, graphically described and utterly pornographic. Makes you think that Nathan was right about her all along.

So Nathan and Sophie make a suicide pact. It's about time something ends this novel, after 500 long pages just to get to her choice. Oh, and what was it about? Just a few paragraphs, no explanation, just over and done with in a moment. The book then moves sickenly to the ending thud where Nathan and Sophie ingest double cyanide tablets and die together on Sophie's bed. As Stingo observed, everything revolves around the bed, at least in his dirty mind it does.

This book is a good character study of what happens when people rot in their sinful condition, God giving them up to their lusts, ending in death. It illustrates the downward spiral depicted in Romans Chapter 1 with the apropos ending in Romans Chapter 6:23 "The wages of sin is death..." The nail of the coffin, the final solution to sin for those who don't take the second part of the verse.

I first read some pages of Sophie's Choice in 1986, when a friend of mine would carry it for his personal reading. There was no Internet the way it is nowadays. If you wanted to buy books in English in a country where it wasn't the official language, you were forced to go to a seller whose prices were very high. Now, it took me less than 10 minutes to find the edition which pleased me the most and I proceeded to purchase it instantly. In a matter of 6 days I had the book in my hands here in Guatemala. I am happy with it, not only for the fact it is a superb novel written by a superb author, but with the quality of the material, the format of the book, the size and shape of the font type, the unique design of the cover and, of course, its very low price.

While the movie version of this book features an indelible performance of Sophie by the lustrous Meryl Streep, Styron's novel is in all ways richer, thicker, yet more taut and horrifying than the movie could ever be. This is one those books you become invested in; you can't put it down yet it draws you closer to the flame. It has never left me after 20 years. One of the all-time best novels about World War II, with almost tangible descriptions of places you know - like Brooklyn - and places you hope you never know - like Auschwitz.

Sophie, a woman, is a concentration camp survivor. This has left her, not unsurprisingly, with a lot of problems.

This carries over into her life in the United States, and the relationships she has, in particular with one man. He is also an unstable and broken individual.

This is not set up to be a happy story.

The cover for the edition I read looks like a romance novel, and the first third of the book reads like one, albeit a tortured one.

Then the core of the story is revealed, with Auschwitz and all its horrors taking center stage. I have read books with brief mentions of the camps, and of course seen Schindler's List, but this was by far was the clearest rendition of the evils performed there.

A hard read at times, but a necessary one.

In academic discussions, I have heard the nature of Sophie's actual 'choice' for decades. I decided I ought to read a book from which the central choice is so often quoted.

For those interested in Holocaust Studies, this is not the book you're looking for, and I urge you to seek out nonfiction accounts; this is a novel about a young American man's postwar intimate relationships and (sexual and creative) maturation.

For those who, like me, have heard of Sophie and her choice, I must say that in her, Styron creates a fascinating and, sometimes, brilliantly executed character. Her own Polish identity, her anti-Semitism, her choice-making moments throughout her life, and her compromised sense of self are facets of a richly dimensional character. Styron's struggles to write about an abused and damaged woman sometimes fail quite badly, though; especially (but certainly not only) those of us who've been abused may notice how he often mischaracterizes the felt experience.

The reason for my two-star review, however, is one I share with others; the main character of Stingo, which certainly seems quite autobiographical at times, takes up far more of the narrative and is far, far less interesting than Sophie, unfortunately! How could the author not tell, when finished, that his title character was much more compelling? I do believe I understand the ways he attempted to interweave the narratives of the different characters, but for most of the book, I wished this sighing, beer-drinking, horny boy would step aside so I could hear more of Sophie. Perhaps it is merely that I can't identify with the main character at all, perhaps [mild spoiler follows here] it's that at some point he invariably wishes to hit and/or rape every young woman with which he meets up, but for the most part, it's that he's just not that interesting. And although the two main characters profess a disdain for Freudianism, the whole book is so laced with layman's psychobabble that it added to my tedium. All in all, this was a somewhat tiresome book featuring one gripping character who, alas, is not the main character.

This is probably my all-time favorite book. I originally read it several years ago and I read it again every year or so. The first time I could hardly put it down. At times funny and tragic but, always mesmeriziing. It is the story of a Polish-Catholic woman with a terrible, almost unbelievable secret and her relationship with her drug-addicted lover and the young writer who becomes their friend and ultimately relates Sophie's story.
The subject matter may make some readers uncomfortable but, it is worth the effort for not only the story but, for the wonderful skill in the use of the language Styron uses in telling it. I would recommend this book to everyone.

If you are able to read this masterpiece for the first time without pre-categorizing it into a particular genre, let alone knowing the background of the title character or the nature of her "choice," count yourself lucky. One of the delights of the book -- and I do mean delights -- is the way that Styron reveals his secrets so gradually, peeling away surfaces like the skins of an onion. The first hint of the horrors that lurk in the background comes as early as page 54 of the Vintage edition, but the meaning of the title is not revealed until the penultimate chapter, almost 500 pages later. In between, the tension builds as detail after detail emerges, but the story also warms and deepens as the reader gets to know the people better. Despite its background in death, SOPHIE'S CHOICE is also triumphantly a novel about life.

Many reviewers on this site have written something to the effect of "I put off reading this because I knew it would be depressing, but it was worth it." But suppose you had no such assumption; you would find a book that is often laugh-aloud funny, in its opening chapters at least, and shot through to the end with a pervasive eroticism. For despite the title, the Polish refugee Sophie is not the principal character. This honor is given to the narrator, a 22-year-old writer from the South, nicknamed Stingo but clearly the author himself, come up to try his luck in the big city. After a hilariously inappropriate stint as a blurb-writer for a Manhattan publisher, he comes into a little money and moves into a boarding house in Brooklyn, where he meets Sophie and her lover Nathan Landau. Although writing in the middle of his career, Styron deliberately adopts the tone of the coming-of-age novel, and absolutely nails the genre. Even without the story of Sophie and Nathan, this would still figure as a significant American novel, a sort of post-grad version of CATCHER IN THE RYE, perfectly capturing that moment of uneasy balance between a vanished past and an uncertain future that was America in 1947. When he is not writing deathless prose or fantasizing about getting laid, Stingo is absorbing a rapid education about the real world, an education that is more multi-faceted than any synopsis might have you believe. On one level, this is a book about the writing process: the attempt to assimilate and make sense of information and emotions coming at you from all sides. I can think of few other books that convey such a convincing sense of what it means to be a writer.

Of course I am aware that to describe SOPHIE'S CHOICE in terms of post-adolescent comedy is like asking "Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?" For what lies behind Sophie's story is of a different scale altogether than anything that Stingo might experience at first hand. As he gets to know these people and glimpse their traumas, Stingo also comes face to face with the existence of pure evil. We see him struggle to encompass the unthinkable, to explain the inexplicable, to empathize with somebody who has faced moral dilemmas most of us can barely imagine. Styron approaches this by frequent shifts of time-period and voice, now having Stingo write as the naive observer caught up in events, now as the objective historian years after the fact. This multiple perspective creates a moral prism in which all kinds of issues are refracted: race and creed, the legacy of slavery, North and South, Jew and Gentile, rich and poor, prudery and sexual liberation, and the challenge to religious belief. If assigned into a category as I mentioned earlier, SOPHIE'S CHOICE would stand as one of the most powerful treatments of its subject in international literature. It also remains one of the richest and most thought-provoking novels about American life and morality written in the postwar period.

Sorry to sound like the jacket cover or something, but this truly is one of the great novels of the 20th century. This story is as dark as they come, and brilliantly written--Styron has a mastery of the English language rivaling any other great American author. The last chapter should be studied in all writing classes. Seriously, this book is amazing. I didn't even want to like it (I admit, because of all of the critical acclaim), but now it has forced its way onto my favorite's list. You win this round, Styron ...

This book was amazing! I read this book from cover to cover in one sitting. I couldn't put it down. Very touching!

You must read this book, although most readers now
won't remember hearing about its subject when it happened.
If human beings are to continue to exist, each one of us
must understand that absolute evil CAN exist in our world.
You may not get very involved in the story for a while,but,
believe me, you will. The movie is excellent, and the book is
even better.

This book was amazing! I read this book from cover to cover in one sitting. I couldn't put it down. Very touching!

You must read this book, although most readers now
won't remember hearing about its subject when it happened.
If human beings are to continue to exist, each one of us
must understand that absolute evil CAN exist in our world.
You may not get very involved in the story for a while,but,
believe me, you will. The movie is excellent, and the book is
even better.