Sophie’s Choice is a grand novel – really world class fiction. It was first published in 1979, and is a complex, daunting and very ambitious novel. It is also a profoundly moving 
“Sophie’s Choice is a thriller of the highest order, all the more thrilling for the fact that the dark, gloomy secrets we are unearthing one by one—sorting through lies and terrible misunderstandings like a hand groping for a golden nugget in a rattlesnake’s nest—may be authentic secrets of history and our own human nature.”
The main character in Sophie’s Choice is Stingo, a young southern man who has moved to New York City after the war. He struggles to become a writer. Along the way he meets Sophie, a beautiful Polish woman whose wrist bears the grim tattoo of a concentration camp, and her Jewish love, Nathan. Nathan is strange and unstable. Most of the time he seems normal, but he can also be wild and violent. Sophie is deeply in love with Nathan, and unable to detach herself even when he is cruel to her.
Stingo somehow connects with both of them. And more so to Sophie, who starts sharing details about her life with him. Even things she keeps secret from Nathan. Much of what she tells concerns the infamous death camp of Auschwitz and the evil things that took place there.
The stories Sophie tells are hard to read. They are the kind of stories that can make you cry. Her suffering was terrible, beyond imaginable in many ways, but even so there were others who were treated far worse. Sophie’s story and her choices are extremely tough.
You should perhaps also be warned that there is some quite graphic sexuality in the novel. Whether it should be called pornography or not, is hard to say. The sex stories to some extent serve to keep the story bearable for the reader, as a book just about Sophie’s tale would be very hard to get through.
Styron’s writing style is very clever and original. He alternates between points of view and changes styles to tell the story in ways which reflect situations and emotions. Sophie’s Choice is beautiful yet heartbreaking, and at times it even manages to be funny – a true literary masterpiece, and in its way a strong tale of survival and the Holocaust as well.
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