There are only a few books in English Literature whose titles have become part of the vernacular, of daily speech. If you open dictionary.com and look up the phrase “Sophie’s choice”, you will get the following definition: “Sophie’s choice refers to an extremely difficult decision a person has to make. It describes a situation where no outcome is preferable over the other. This can be either because both outcomes are equally desirable, or both are equally undesirable”. Sophie’s choice is the name of William Styron’s 1979 classic novel about the tragic life of a polish catholic refugee, Sophie, in New York City. The novel is about the terrible choice she had to make in German Auschwitz and the repercussions of that choice in her resurrected life in New York. There are two men in her life, Stingo, a fellow boarder, a friend; and the other a brilliant, eccentric, and passionate Jew, Nathan, who adores Sophie with every fiber in his being as much as abuses her, verbally and physically. Both the men and the choices Sophie once made are inextricably intertwined, and the unspeakable moral burden of it ripples through every moment of her present life, distorting, shattering, and permeating everything Sophie feels, says, and does. In Styron’s hands, Sophie’s character, like Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, is complex, unforgiving and a constant struggle with her inner demons. This Novel was Styron’s sixth work, and one of the most powerful, transforming, and emotionally engaging pieces of literature written in the last century.
It is not an easy book to read. It is not a book that you can curl up in your bed and read as a distraction. Just as any great work of art should, Sophie’s choice consumes the reader and demands rigor and a serious commitment to the narrative. It is difficult to read the book in one go. Like a spring breeze, Styron writes in flourishing and ornamented prose, very typical of great Southern writers like William Faulkner, Steinbeck, and others. The sentences flow with energy, sometimes running into paragraphs, and quite impossible to read without a dictionary by the side, even if one is reasonably good at the language. The work has to be tasted in small doses spread each day. There are enough testimonies from readers who have gallantly picked up the book, read a dozen pages, and put it back in their library shelves in utter despair, boredom, or sheer incomprehension, hoping to revisit sometime later, and never do. Styron’s own daughter, Alexandra, a novelist, reminiscing about her Father’s legacy in a 2007 New Yorker article “Reading my Father”, wrote how she gave up reading Sophie’s choice as a young girl because of the florid language and winding narrative and could resume the novel only twenty years later when her father was dying. By the time she finished the novel, her father had passed away, she never got a chance to tell him she had finally read his beloved novel and understood the genius behind it.
What then makes Sophie’s choice click? It is the sheer intensity of the story and the moral honesty of the novel. The novel was born out of William Styron’s brief stay at a boarding house in Brooklyn, just after the second world war, where one of the fellow boarders on the first floor was a blond Polish woman with a concentration camp number tattooed on her left arm. Styron knew nothing much of the woman or her history, but somehow the image registered in his mind, and thirty years later, in 1976, he woke up one morning in his sprawling ranch in Connecticut, dreaming and conceiving of a story with that polish image as its tragic protagonist. Styron’s grip on the narrative from the very first sentence of the novel, when Stingo, the fictional alter ego of Styron, expresses his desire to find a home in Brooklyn, to the last line eight hundred pages later, when Stingo muses on the tragic fates of Nathan and Sophie and the dizzying truths he has learned from Sophie, is nothing short of breathtaking. Even as the story zigzags across time, digresses into long soliloquies, and breaks into philosophical ruminations; underneath this powerful flow of ideas, there is this steady subterranean current of friendship, love, faith, and human resilience that holds the seams of the story together, and frames the narrative within a larger tapestry of historical forces, human will, and redemption.
The choice Sophie is forced to make at the concentration camp is an unthinkable one, and she has no choice but to make it. There lies the paradox. Styron’s pulsating narrative slowly builds up to a heart-wrenching climax; ensuring, along the way, that the reader is mentally prepared and ready to digest the implications of Sophie’s choice. And when we so reach the climax, our hearts skip a few beats, our eyes involuntarily tear (a little or more depending on how sensitive we are) and in a flashing instant, the truth of Sophie’s choice and its aftermath unveils, like a palimpsest, the hidden layers of Sophie’s character, It is the quality of Styron’s writing and his insight into the terrible horror of Germany’s Jewish solution that elevates the book to a classic. His sentences move like a river in spate, roaring and foaming with power and energy. The choice of words, the deft (and sometimes laborious)construction of sentences paint the reader’s consciousness in vivid emotional colors. The sheer brilliance of the language, the range of vocabulary, the translucent and effortless flow of each sentence, are breathtaking.
In 1982, Director Alan Pakula adapted the Novel into a movie. It is always a difficult proposition to translate a literary classic to screen; more so, in the case of a work such as Sophie’s choice, where the story principally revolves around three characters, whose lives are complex, deep, and often understood only through their introspection and the author’s. Styron often writes pages to bring out what Sophie thinks and feels in a given situation. Therefore, the actor who could bring Sophie to life had to be nothing short of genius. Alan’s first choice to play Sophie was actor Liv Ullman and a few others, and Styron himself has Ursula Andress, the Swedish actress, in mind; but nothing worked out, and Meryl Streep was offered the role. In the annals of cinema, there are very few performances that have been called spectacular, and if there is any yardstick to measure what spectacular means, it has to be Streep’s unbelievable portrayal of Sophie on screen. If you have read the book, you cannot imagine anyone daring to embrace the complexity and the range of emotions Sophie’s characters demand. But somehow, magically, transcendentally, Streep manages not only to bring the fictional Sophie to life but to further illuminate the character. Apart from the technical aspects of getting the looks right, getting the Polish, English, and the German accents in place, getting the gestures and body language right, Streep was able to distill Sophie’s fictional essence, as Styron conceived her, into her performance, which is the best compliment an actor can ever get. I would go so far as to say that Streep’s performance is one of those few cases, where an onscreen version of a character in a novel helps to understand the literary source better. For her effort, she won the second of the three Academy Awards of her career (among the twenty-one nominations so far) In fact, after watching the movie Sophie’s choice many hesitant readers have gone back to read the book again, and when they do so the greatness of Styron’s literary achievement hits them with full force.
A great work of literature, or any art for that matter, is necessarily complex. It cannot be otherwise. It demands active participation from the subject who engages with it. Furthermore, it is by engaging with complexity that refines our sensibilities and skills. Why are we drawn to Da Vinci’s Monalisa or Dostoevsky’s Crime and punishment, or to Beethoven’s fifth symphony over and over again? Because each time we visit these classics, we see, understand, and listen differently, bringing to bear our life experiences to the act. Life is always a movement from the simple to the complex, and the more refined we become, the better we can penetrate the complexity of any science or art. William Styron’s Sophie’s choice is a complex work; it embraces a wide spectrum of human experience, especially the depravity of the human soul and the banality of evil — in Hannah Arendt’s word — witnessed during the Jewish holocaust. Styron’s greatest achievement as a novelist was to bring together different strands of the immense tragedy and weave it into a grand novel, rooted in historical facts and interspersed with generous doses of fiction. The novel was banned in many countries, and within America itself, many public libraries and schools refused to keep it. Apart from controversial references to the Polish indifference to the Jewish tragedy, the book is full of vivid sexual descriptions in Styron’s lush prose that could easily put a pulp magazine to shame. Even the most open-minded of readers will cringe at the explicit sexual details in some scenes. But, once we have got past the initial shock, and begin to see the overarching theme of the novel, we realize that Styron is merely exploring the deeper depths of the human psyche, and at some level, we come to feel that the pleasurable pains of physical gratification, that Styron so liberally describes, are integral to his characters. The raw physicality of the sexual intercourse between them becomes an anesthetic to the existential pain born out of their condition and the burden of memories. Sophie, Nathan, and Stingo desperately need that relief to preserve their sanity.
Please read Sophie’s choice, if you can. I promise It will be a rewarding and transforming experience, and then watch the movie. You will see how Meryl Streep has lived the life of Sophie Zawistowska, one of the most powerful literary creations ever.
God bless…
Yours in mortality,
Bala