Sophie’s Choice is a 1979 novel by American author William Styron, the author’s last novel. The story details the relationships of three people sharing a boarding house in Brooklyn.
Stingo, a young aspiring writer from the South, Jewish scientist Nathan Landau, and his lover, Sophie, a Polish-Catholic survivor of the German Nazi concentration camps, whom Stingo befriends.
Stingo, a novelist, is recalling the summer when he began his first novel, having been fired from his low-level reader’s job at the publisher McGraw-Hill and has moved into a cheap boarding house in Brooklyn, where he hopes to devote some months to his writing.
While working on his novel, he’s drawn into the lives of the lovers Nathan Landau and Sophie Zawistowska, fellow boarders at the house, who are involved in an intense and difficult relationship.
The beautiful Sophie is Polish and Catholic and a survivor of the Holocaust and Nazi concentration camps, and Nathan is Jewish-American and purportedly a genius.
Although Nathan claims to be a Harvard graduate and a cellular biologist with a pharmaceutical company, it is revealed that this story is a fabrication.
Almost no one, including Sophie and Stingo knows that Nathan has paranoid schizophrenia and that he is abusing stimulants.
He sometimes behaves quite normally and generously, but there are times when he becomes frighteningly jealous, violent, abusive, and delusional.
As the story progresses, Sophie tells Stingo of her past. She describes her violently anti-Semitic father, a law professor in Kraków; her unwillingness to help him spread his ideas; her arrest by the Nazis; and particularly her brief stint as a stenographer-typist in the home of Rudolf Höss, the commander of Auschwitz, where she was interned. She specifically relates her attempts to seduce Höss in an effort to persuade him that her blond, blue-eyed, German-speaking son should be allowed to leave the camp and enter the Lebensborn program, in which he would be raised as a German child. She failed in this attempt and ultimately never learned of her son’s fate. Only at the end of the book does the reader also learn what became of Sophie’s daughter, Eva.
At Auschwitz, tell me, where was God?
William Styron, Sophie’s Choice
Where was man?
Eventually, Nathan’s delusions lead him to believe that Stingo is having an affair with Sophie and he threatens to kill them both.
As Sophie and Stingo attempt to flee New York, Sophie reveals her deepest secret: On the night that she arrived at Auschwitz, a camp doctor made her choose which of her two children would die immediately by gassing and which would continue to live, albeit in the camp. Of her two children, Sophie chose to sacrifice her eight-year-old daughter, Eva, in a decision that has left her in mourning and filled with a guilt that she cannot overcome. By now alcoholic and deeply depressed, Sophie is willing to self-destruct with Nathan, who has already tried to persuade her to die by suicide with him.
Despite Stingo proposing marriage and a shared night that relieves Stingo of his virginity and fulfills many of his sexual fantasies, Sophie disappears, leaving only a note in which she says that she must return to Nathan.
Upon arriving back in Brooklyn, Stingo is devastated to discover that Sophie and Nathan…
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