Author: William Styron
Translator: Jeong-a Han
Publisher: Minumsa
2-volume set | 224*130mm
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About This Book
More than once in this smugly autobiographical novel, Styron pouts about
how his last book, The Confessions of Nat Turner, drew accusations of
exploitation, accusations that "I had turned to my own profit and
advantage the miseries of slavery." And Sophie's Choice will probably
draw similar accusations about Styron's use of the Holocaust: his new
novel often seems to be a strong but skin-deep psychosexual melodrama
that's been artificially heaped with import by making one of the
characters - Sophie - a concentration-camp survivor. Her full name is
Sophie Zawistowska, and she's the only other non-Jewish tenant in the
Flatbush boarding house where narrator "Stingo," the young Styron, comes
to attempt his first novel in 1947 after a brief nightmare as a reader
at McGraw-Hill. Virtually virginal Stingo, of course, lusts like crazy
after gorgeously 30-ish Sophie, but she is noisily, hotly in love with
Nathan Landau, the brilliant, erratic biologist who nursed immigrant
Sophie back to health after meeting her in the library. Soon Nathan,
Sophie, and Stingo are a bouncy threesome, smiling together through
Coney Island picnics or suffering together whenever Nathan has one of
his irrational, jealous, abusive fits. And Sophie begins to reveal to
Stingo, layer by layer, her guilty secrets: how she was both victim and
accomplice at Auschwitz, playing the role of anti-Semite to ingratiate
herself with officials; how she was willing to use her body to gain
advantages; how she was forced to choose which of her two young children
would die in the gas chamber. These reminiscences give Styron an
opportunity to expound on the Holocaust and anti-Semitism, and to give
the novel an ostensible unity: "Someday I will write about Sophie's life
and death, and thereby help demonstrate how absolute evil is never
extinguished from the worM." But Sophie's death - a suicide pact with
Nathan (who's soon exposed as a certifiable lunatic) after a brief but
elaborate roll in the hay with Stingo - is only tenuously linked to the
evil of Auschwitz; it's more in the good old Southern-gothic tradition.
And when Styron tells us that Stingo has learned through Sophie about
"death, and pain, and loss, and the appalling enigma of human
existence," the pomposity seems unsupported, unearned by Stingo/Styron.
Lesser problems too: the clumsy narrative shifts in the Auschwitz
flashbacks, the impossibly ornate dialogue, the self-dramatizing, the
diminishing returns of Styron's "encyclopedic ability to run on and on
about a subject." Still, with all that said, Styron is a born writer,
and when he's just storytelling - and not playing the dubious role of
Great American Writer and Thinker - there's enough detailed, vigorous,
sheer readability here to sustain even some of those readers bound to be
turned off by the sticky contrivances and hollow pretentions. (Kirkus
Reviews)
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