Novel
Sophie's Choice
William Styron · 1979
Synopsis
Brooklyn, summer 1947. Stingo, twenty-two, who has come from Virginia to write a novel after being dismissed by a publisher, rents a room in a pink-painted boarding house in Flatbush. Above him live Sophie, a Polish Catholic recently arrived from Europe who works for a chiropractor, and her lover Nathan, a brilliant and capricious Brooklyn Jew who says he is a biologist. She recounts her past in pieces, and each version corrects the previous one.
Context
Its author had met, in 1949, under the same roof in Brooklyn, a Polish survivor named Sophie, who inspired the character thirty years later. In the United States, Jewish critics, among them Alvin Rosenfeld and Cynthia Ozick, reproached him for placing a non-Jewish victim at the centre of a book about the camps; Styron replied that the Nazi machine threatened all men, and not only the Jews. Alan J. Pakula made a film from it in 1982, with Meryl Streep.
Who it is for
A long novel, with two nested narratives and a broken chronology. The camp scenes are brief but harsh. Translated by Maurice Rambaud.
Prizes and reception
National Book Award 1980, then called the American Book Award, a great bookshop success, and a title that has passed into everyday language.
Sources for this page 12
The pages consulted to check this page.