Finding the
right title for a book is often the bane of an author’s existence. One highly
successful present-day author is so book-title challenged that she runs contests
among beta readers to come up with the best titles for her tomes. Author
William Styron (1925 - 2006) didn’t have that problem, and of all of the great
titles among his published works, the absolute spot-on one is Sophie’s Choice, published in 1979. Apart from the fact that it has found
a home in the lexicon as an idiom translated as “faced with a forced decision
in which all options have equally negative outcomes,” amazingly, those two
little words hold within themselves the entire description of this 626-page
novel. This is because contained in every major theme of this masterwork,
Sophie is confronted with unbearable choices—she just can’t win, a consequence
infecting everyone else around her—and of course, that is the seminal factor of
the story. She is doomed, as is her paramour Nathan. An adjunct to the story is
Stingo’s unlucky fate, as well—Stingo, the narrator of this story about three
people in three separate rooms in a boarding house in post Second World War Brooklyn
and the third leg of the ménage a trios around which the novel is constructed—Stingo, the young and naive writer whose life can only be
construed as a portrayal of Willian Styron himself; Nathan, the drug-riddled,
brilliant and charismatic lover; and Sophie, the beautiful and embattled Polish
survivor of the Nazi terror, around whom the plot centers in regard to a tragic
decision she was forced to make upon imprisonment at Auschwitz Concentration
Camp during the war.
Stingo’s Sophie’s Choice, to make
use of the idiom here, was whether or not to woo Sophie, for whom he suffered
an agonizing passion, or to honor his friendship with Nathan. A choice between
his unbearable life or release through self-inflicted death was Nathan’s
Sophie’s Choice. And Sophie’s options, or lack thereof, were fixed a handful of
years before, specifically on the day she came face to face with the fascists' hideous ignominy toward life—her chances ruined
by the blight it continued to cast on her life, as on countless others, for
incalculable years following the war to defeat Hitler's evil regime.
Despite his unrequited desire to bed Sophie, and his failed
attempts at love with every surrogate female who crossed his path, Stingo/Styron
did walk away with a good story that found voice in the bestselling Sophie’s Choice, a winner of the US
National Book Award for Fiction and the book widely considered his greatest
literary achievement. Five years in the writing, the book was, says Styron,
“suggested by a mere germ of experience. I had been living in a boardinghouse
in Brooklyn one summer just after the war and such a girl lived on the floor
above me; she was beautiful, but ravaged. I never got to know her very well,
but I was moved by her plight. Then, about five years ago, I awoke one morning
with a remembrance of this girl; a vivid dream haunted my mind. I suddenly
sensed that I had been given a mandate to abandon the novel I had been at work
on and write her story.”
Although deemed a modern
masterpiece and a profound meditation on the foremost evil of the Twentieth
Century, it is not without controversy, especially among those who consider
some topics so heinous as to be unspeakable. A number of his detractors found
Styron opportunistic and exploitive in this choice of topic, this one
especially judged the third rail of letters. Styron answered his critics
thusly: “No event could be so hideous that it would defy a novelist to trespass
upon it. It was an episode in history that cried out to be explored, the
ultimately challenging subject for a novelist.”
Bringing history to life in fiction can be tricky
business. The central dilemmas of the authors of historical fiction are how to
avoid coming across as pedantic, as well as how to
bypass stiff and dry parroting of statistical information gleaned through
research. The best advice I can offer in that regard is to study Styron’s
techniques in this book. He couched his deep exploration of the history of the Nazi’s
horrendous pursuit of a "Final Solution" in his characters—the
actions of his characters revealed the history. He made an untouchable and
unutterable story, real and describable by having his characters sweep the
floors and vomit all over themselves and pee their pants.
An additional literary device Styron used successfully, and
an effective one often employed by writers, is the suggestion of background
music to set a mood or design an ambience, and in this case, to announce
Sophie’s presence or absence in her room. Nathan’s phonograph and enviable
collection of long-playing classical records, housed in Sophie’s room, were
crucial to the story. I last saw this method used in an outstanding book I read
in recent months which I will review here in the coming weeks—a novel titled Those Who Save Us, authored by Jenna
Blum, another book centered on Second World War Europe.
I
would venture a guess that far more people are familiar with the Academy
Award-winning film of the same name than with the book. Although an outstanding
film, one of the best, do yourself a favor and read Sophie’s Choice. Savor Styron’s intricate weaving of Stingo’s
story, which the film downplayed, but which is the driving force of the book,
lending it a full compliment of emotions and diversity of experiences that
divert to lighter places, here and there, the heavy stream this novel follows.
In addition, Styron’s elaborate prose is not to be missed…but keep your
dictionary handy. Styron loved his polysyllabic words. Ha Ha! www.booksbylindaleegreene.gallery-llgreene.com
www.gallery-llgreene.com
No comments:
Post a Comment