Sophie’s Choice

Press, 4 December 1979, Page 8 (Supplement)

Sophie’s Choice

“Sophie’s Choice.” By William Styron. Published: Jonathan Cape p.p. 515. New Zealand price: $12.95. The Nazi Concentration Camps spawned not only a heritage of horror, but also sociological theories of stress behaviour, studies in personality distintegration and development, and even hypotheses of the development of autism in children. They have also been the basis of numerous novels, with particular fascination in the lives of people who managed to survive the worst that men could manufacture on earth. Such a survivor is Sophie who has the added dimensions that she was a Gentile among dying, tortured Jews in Auschwitz, that her father was an active Polish anti-

Semite, and that she had a relatively comfortable, favoured position as a stenographer for the camp commandant Hoss. Her survival and the degrading subterfuges she used to ensure this, leave her with the guilt typical of the piteous few who were finally rescued, people found surrounded by piles of children’s shoes and memories of the millions who had passed through before their cremation.

The novel begins in the Jewish-American style of the sixties, a style such as that of Herman Wouk in “Marjorie Morningstar " Sophie is in Brooklyn, involved in a tempestuous affair with an insane Jewish lover.

Stingo, who sounds very much like the author as a young man. moves from listening to their noisy love-making in the room underneath their bed, to attempts to lose his virginity with their circle of friends, to collecting the crumbs of left-over love that Sophie has when her passion goes awry. In the process she tells Stingo her background, and the tragedy with her haunted lover comes to an inevitable conclusion.

Slightly wordy, this is nevertheless an excellent exploration of complex human relationships and of lives that could not be reassembled after experiences of the Second World War, by the author of the best "seller “The Confessions of Nat Turner.”