SOPHIE’S CHOICE by William Styron (1976, novel, 515 pages)

Sophie’s choice is a towering literary accomplishment. This book—winner of the National Book Award in 1980—presents a carefully-researched fictional treatment of the Holocaust. The book is a parade of surprises and offers terrific prose on just about every page.

The protagonist, Stingo, is a young aspiring novelist based on Styron. The central relationship of the novel is among Stingo, Stingo’s friend Sophie, and Sophie’s lover Nathan.

William Styron is a brilliant satirist who somehow is able to fill this heart-wrenching story with passages that make one laugh out loud, such as this one in which Stingo describes his first sight of Sophie’s lovely body:

As [Sophie] went slowly up the stairs I took a good look at her body in its clinging silk summer dress…. Her behind was as perfectly formed as some fantastic prize-winning pear; it vibrated with magical eloquence, and from this angle it so stirred my depths that I mentally pledged to the Presbyterian orphanages of Virginia a quarter of my future earnings as a writer in exchange for that bare ass's brief lodging--thirty seconds would do--within the compass of my cupped, supplicant palms.

And here, Stingo describes his first encounter with the beautiful Leslie Lapidus. Stingo is narrating this event probably 20 years after it happened. In the scene being described, he is a virgin in his early 20’s, and the setting is a beach:

Somewhere in the halcyon future, I think I must have reasoned, I would meet a cuddlesome, jolly girl who would simply gather me into her with frenzied whoopees, unhindered by that embargo placed upon their flesh by the nasty little Protestants who had so tortured me in the back seats of a score of cars. But there was one matter of which I had no inkling. I had not yet considered that my dream girl would also lack any inhibition about language; my companions of the past would have been unable to utter the word “breast” without blushing. Indeed, I had been accustomed to wincing when a female said “damn.” You can imagine my emotions, then, when Leslie Lapidus, a scant two hours after our first meeting, stretched out her resplendent legs against the sand like a young lioness, and peering into my face with all the unrestrained, almond-eyed, heathen-whore-of-Babylon wantonness I had ever dreamed of, suggested in unbelievably scabrous terms the adventure that awaited me. It would be impossible to exaggerate my shock, in which fright, disbelief and tingling delight were torrentially mingled. Only the fact that I was too young for a coronary occlusion saved my heart, which stopped beating for critical seconds.

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Stingo the narrator, like Styron the author, is very well-read, especially in terms of the Holocaust literature. Therefore, along the way, the reader who jots down notes and follows up with a bit of research can actually learn about the Holocaust. (I used this book as a jumping-off point to lead me to several other forays into the Holocaust literature.)

Styron offers well-founded cognitions (through the narration of Stingo and sometimes of Sophie) of the events of the Holocaust—for example, here is an observation by Stingo:

Real evil, the suffocating evil of Auschwitz—gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring—was perpetrated almost exclusively by civilians. Thus we find that the rolls of the SS at Auschwitz-Birkenau contained almost no professional soldiers but were instead composed of a cross section of German society. They included waiters, bakers, carpenters, restaurant owners, physicians, a bookkeeper, a post office clerk, a waitress, a bank clerk … the list goes on and on with these commonplace … pursuits. There needs only to be added the observation that history’s greatest liquidator of Jews, the thick-witted Heinrich Himmler, was a chicken farmer.

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In creating fictitious stories about the Holocaust, there is always the danger of cheapness, or of sentimentality, or of inaccuracy in terms of what the Holocaust was like. But Styron tells this story with grace, with a sense of respect for the tragedy, and—as far as I can tell from all of my other reading about the Holocaust—with basic truth about the Holocaust that testifies to (I gather) a bulwark of personal research on the part of Styron.

I have a recommendation: Before you read Sophie’s choice, read Death dealer: The memoirs of the SS Kommandant at Auschwitz, by Rudolf Hoss. While not a necessity, treating the Hoss book as a prerequisite will give you a deeper understanding of some of the events in Sophie’s choice.

If it can ever be said that a particular novel is an essential contribution to the Holocaust literature, then it can be said of Sophie’s choice.