Resumo de Sophie's Choice - William Styron

Write your abstract here.Wiliam styron passed away of Pneumonia this Nov 1st, 2006. Born in 1925, a very creative and recognized author since early age. somewhat attracted to dark themes like suicide and slavery but very honest in his face to face analysis of these subjects.SPOILER WARNING. THE ENDING OF THE NOVEL IS CONTAINED IN THIS REVIEWSophie is a polish -non jewish woman who was rescued from Auschwitz and came to New York. The narrator - Stingo- a young writer relates the story of Sophie and her lover , the brilliant Nathan landau. Stingo shares with the reader details of his coming of age at the END of the war. His desire to be a novelist, his sexual awakenings, desires and frustrations in the 1940's puritan environment; we participate in the heated discussions of Nathan criticizing the american south as a land of illiterate, slave holding, black lynching barbarians. Younger Stingo defends his southern heritage with moderate success against the powerful debater, Nathan. The couple is in love, Sophie is branded by her stay in the concentration camps. She is full of contradictions. her father was a anti-semitic polish professor, she disliked her husband because he was of this same persuassion. As a typist for the professor she learns her father is recommending extermination for the jews that abound in Poland at the time, in the early 1940's. Nevertheless, the professor and sophie's husband are arrested and murdered like many other non-jewish slavics. Sophie has two children, they are the spinal cord of the novel. A daughter Eva, a son Jan. In Auschwitz sophie was for some time the translator for high ranking Nazi officer Rudolph Hoss. She tries to save her son by seducing Hoss, she almost succeeds. This 526 page novel of very intense and elegant prose describes in detail the horrible and atrocious reality of Auschwitz, Dachaw, Birkenau and specially Treblinka. the main theme of the book is a close up portrait of the real face of Nazi germany's unforgivable crimes against the jews and the human race in general. The next theme is the extreme power of the instinct of motherhood. Sophie tries at any cost to save her children and stay alive to fight for them. The choice: Only once in the book, Sophie reveals that on arrival at Auschwitz, the medical officer selecting the arriving jews who will go to labor camps or the incinerator wagons plays a demonical practical farce of a joke. He gives Sophie her choice. One of her children will die and the other one will live. The scene is harrowing. To avoid both of them being killed, she decides to save her son and observes as her little girl is led away to her death. This is the end of Sophie's spiritual life. her soul is dead. She is remorseful about the choice She made. She feels guilt for having survived herself and to the best of her knowledge both children died anyway in the war. Most of all, she wants to end her life. She hates God and his handy work. She flatly refuses to believe there is a God, if it were so, where was God when her children were murdered? Sophie is rescued from her downslope by Nathan who turns out to be an unstable Schyzophrenic himself. Obsessed with drugs and cyanide pills. the narrator, stingo, is madly infatuated with Sophie, tries to protect her from Nathan and his destructive rage fits. He steals her to live with him in a farm in the south and lives a one night honeymoon with her. She escapes in the middle of the night and returns to Brooklyn. In the end, Nathan and Sophie commit a suicide pact with cyanide capsules. Stingo is distraught, but somehow he manages to survive the whole tragedy. There are so many messages in this book it is hard to number them all. The most important one in my opinion is the utter immensity of man's power to kill others. The extremes of xenophobia. Absolute evil has no limits when it reigns unchecked, after reading this book, the world has no choice but to get better, God knows how.

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