‘SOPHIE’S CHOICE’ AND IT IS A STORY OF THREE PERSONS, TWO MEN ALL OF THEM CONFUSED ABOUT LIVE AND RELIGION…
By
Mansor Puteh
“…My father
was really right when he said he had never known a Jew who could give something
in a free way, without asking for something in return. A quid pro quo, as he would say.
And oh, Nathan – what an example Nathan was of that! Okay, he helped me a
lot, make me well, but so what? Do you think he done that out of love, out of kindness?
No, Stingo, he done such a thing only to use me, have me, f… me, beat me, have
some object to possess! That’s all, have some object! Oh, it was all so very
Jewish of Nathan to do that – he wasn’t giving me his love, he was buying me with it, like all Jews. No
wonder the Jews were so hated in Europe ,
thinking they could get just by paying a little money, a little Geld. Even love they think they can
buy!” She clutched me by the sleeve and the odor of rye whiskey reached me
through the gasoline fumes. “Jews! God knows how I hate them! Oh, the lies I
have told you, Stingo. Everything I have told you about Cracow
* * * * * * *
This
novel by William Styron is certainly interesting to read. It is thick and
heavy, and the chapters are long with sentences that go on and on…which is what
I like in any novel.
There
are many words in English which I had not heard of before. And there are also
some in Polish, Yiddish and other Eastern European languages that I had not
heard of before which are in italics.
If the
author, William Styron is indeed expressing his fears and anxieties in the
character he has created called Stingo, who has problems, then I feel sorry for
William who may be mentally ill when he was writing this novel.
Which was also unfortunate that it had found some support from
I missed
watching the film. But I can tell that it is a faint resemblance to the novel
which is littered with foul words and descriptions of sexual activities.
It is so
interesting that I decided to read all of it in 2011, after getting a hardcover
copy of the novel in April, 1979, when I was then living in Boston
I bought
a lot of books when I was in Boston and also
living in New York City
I did
try to read ‘Sophie’s Choice’ but gave up after about sixty pages of the 515
pages of this novel.
It is
mostly set in New York City
It is
all about sex, wine and drugs…whose combination was fatal that ultimately led
to the suicide of Nathan and Sophie with Stingo, the central character becoming
witness to the couple’s ultimate sacrifice.
The two
and also Stingo did not seem to be capable of living in New
York City , where they had all come from different parts of the
country with Sophie being an immigrant who survived Auschwitz
and the Holocaust and being gassed because she was not a Jew.
The
passages each of the three central characters in the novel had to go through
were indeed long and Stingo whose narration it is, is equally so, as what
William the Author had deemed that to be.
He would
ramble on and on saying mostly the same things again about his sexual fantasies
and attacks on the religious and social as well as cultural values of the
others.
As a
reader, I am not bothered by the diatribe. I can bear with it because I am
witness to the three’s slide from sanity to insanity.
And from
where I had come from, the three can be described as lunatic people who had no
lives to live; even Stingo the aspiring twenty-two-year-old unpublished author
who is writing his debut novel and living frugally does not know where his next
meal would come from.
Even to
the very end the novel is not completed. Even the story of New York City
I did
not feel that William the Author and through his mouthpiece in the novel,
Stingo had failed to take me to the City.
He
(William/Stingo) was strong in describing a woman’s physical features, but not
those of the city and the places where Nathan, Sophie and Stingo go to because
their lives seem to center around their apartment, bars and parks and nowhere
else.
This is certainly not
But I
could tell how through their words, actions and thoughts how the City and also
America and Europe or the West were sliding backwards, the more America
welcomes immigrants from Europe who had experienced the Holocaust.
And the
hidden agenda or theme seems to rest here not in what Stingo says.
It is
not easy for anyone to be able to write a novel like this that tries to bring
out things that are hidden deep in one’s heart and minds without ever trying to
find faults with them, especially the Jews during the Holocaust and in America
where some of those who managed to survive may have pangs on what they had
experienced earlier or that their close relatives had to go through.
And in
this novel most of the things are poured out in bars and the tripartite
relations between Nathan, Sophie and Stingo, all of whom have different reasons
to go to New York City, with the first two, the hapless couple ending their
lives and Stingo, to bear witness to what they had to go through and how they
decided to end their lives…
I shall
end this review by pasting a passage in the novel said by Sophie, whose page
number I have forgotten, which is towards the end of it.
* * * * * * *
“…was a
little church, I do not believe it was Catholic, I think it must have been
Lutheran, but it don’t matter – I had this idea that if I killed myself in this
church, it would be the greatest sacrilege I could ever commit, le plus grand blaspheme, because you
see, Stingo, I didn’t care no more: after Auschwitz, I didn’t believe in God or
if He existed. I would say to myself: He has turned His back on me. And if He
has turned His back on me, then I hate Him so that to show and prove my hatred
I would commit the greatest sacrilege I could think of. Which is, I would
commit my suicide in His church, on sacred ground. I was feeling so bad, I was
so weak and sick still, but after a while I got some of my strength back and
one night I decided to do this thing.”
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