Sophie's Choice

I knew very little about Sophie's Choice when I picked it up.  I downloaded this William Styron novel, along with several others higher on the list, for a steal during the Black Friday sales on Amazon.

What I did know about it was that Sophie was a Holocaust survivor.  I knew she was forced which one of her children would be sent to the gas chambers.  And I knew it had Meryl Streep.

The book was longer than I expected and at one point I accidentally spoiled a major point in the story.  At that point I shrugged my shoulders, went to Wikipedia, and spoiled some of the other major plot twists.  Nonetheless I was thoroughly entertained while reading it.

I will say that I was extremely surprised by the sheer graphic nature of the book.  I didn't mind it at all, but I was not expecting Styron to devote so much text to sex.  I would ask my wife repeatedly "Did _____ happen in the movie," and at times I don't think she fully believed me when I mentioned some of differences between the book.

The book is extremely well written. It's main character is a very real character and this is likely as Styron merges a lot of his self - down to his interest in Nat Turner - to Stingo. This book handled some very major themes, particularly the sense of guilt.  Sophie demonstrated so many ways to feel guilt: in survival, in her failure to action, in the way she did act while in the camps.  I think the destruction in the final chapter of the book was inevitable given Sophie's background & history.

Styron's book was unique in it's portrayal of a Holocaust victim who is not Jewish, another fact I was not aware of until I started reading.  Often we only put our focus on the 6 million Jews that perished.  The Nazi regime did not just focus on the "Jewish question;" the Third Reich killed nearly 1 million Romani, 3 million Russian POWs and 2 million Poles (let us also never forget the Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, physically & mentally disabled, and Freemasons who also perished).

As I stated earlier, Styron's book takes painstaking efforts to make the characters real.  With the exception of a few residents of the tertiary characters, none of the characters are two-dimensional stereotypes.  In that vain, Styron does not paint any of the characters in black & white terms, even Rudolf Hoss.  Styron seeks to show the humanity, the capacity for humans to both commit evil and good.  Our narrator even speculates on the intentions of the doctor who forced Sophie to make her choice and how he could do it.

Upon reflection, one of the most interesting depictions on the book is religion.  Despite Nathan Landau being such a prideful Jew and Sophie having been at one point a devout Catholic, nearly every character (despite being influenced by religion) seems to border agnosticism.

And perhaps that is why one of the book's most poignant quotes near the end is as follows:

The most profound statement yet made about Auschwitz was not a statement at all, but a response.

The query: "At Auschwitz, tell me, where was God?

Days Elapsed: 218
Books Completed: 5/100
Pages Read: 1631
Money Spent: $29.99

The Sheltering Sky

Part of me feels very neglectful in this blog. I cannot say what the passage of time was between The Postman Always Rings Twice and The Sheltering Sky.  Much like the characters in Paul Bowle's adventure trek through the Algerian desert, I found myself the victim of greater forces beyond my control, albeit mine were of a far more mundane variety.

The Sheltering Sky tells the story of three American travelers, a married couple and their friend, as they explore the vastness of Algeria.  The word travelers is an important distinction, as I think I'd do Port Moseby a disservice if I made him out to be otherwise.

"Whereas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveler, belonging no more to one place than to the next, moves slowly, over periods of years, from one part of the earth to another. Indeed, he would have found it difficult to tell, among the many places he had lived, precisely where it was where he had felt most at home." (Bowles 6).

The book features infidelity, disease, death, deception, indecency, decay and distrust.  From those adjectives, you'd except the story to be quite an exciting escape from reality.  Unfortunately, I found the first half of the novel to move rather too slowly.

It was not until (spoilers) the illness and death of Port and Kit's disappearance and descent into madness that I really came to enjoy the story. I already knew of these two essential facts - this was in the author's own foreward - but this major preemptive reveal did not diminish my reading experience. If anything, I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop when Port first fell ill with typhus.

The last third of the book, detailing Kit's complete abandonment of the sum of her being was by far the best part.  Bowles masterfully almost writes an entirely new character that is still so familiar to us as the Kit of the first half of the novel.  The detail to which he describes her thought process and total embrace of insanity made the reading worth while. I do not feel like this last third of the book redeemed the rest of it - I recall Kurt Vonnegut's G-d Bless You Mr. Rosewater and after reading the final lines of the book just smiled - but this was not a struggle in the same way The Ginger Man was.

Days Elapsed: 218
Books Completed: 4/100
Pages Read: 1056
Money Spent: $27.97