Sophie's Choice

This powerful story angered many when it was published, but Styron is asking serious questions: How do you survive a terrible experience, especially one that forces you to make an agonizing choice? Can you, in fact, survive that? He takes what I believe is the most extreme case of survivor guilt imaginable, which is the heart-rending decision that Sophie is forced to make and which is the core of the novel.

That’s in the past–the recent past for the characters–and in the present, the three main people in the novel find themselves in a painful love triangle that arises specifically… show more.

This book haunted me long after I had finished it.

It is based on a true story and takes us back to the horrendous days of Auschwitz, where Sophie had to make the choice of saving just one of her two children and she chose her son, Jan, sending her daughter Eva to the gas chamber. A choice no mother should have to make, and after making such a choice, sadly, she never saw her son again.

We must fast forward to 1947, and Sophie is a Polish immigrant in New York, where she lives in a boarding house with… show more.

This is one of those books whose central dilemma has always haunted me: if you had to choose one of your two children to live and the other to die, which would it be? I personally can’t think of a more ghastly ultimatum to be given but this is at the heart of Sophie’s Choice, about a woman who is a Holocaust survivor but deeply traumatised by the choice the Nazis forced to make – either select one child to survive or both will be killed. 

A whammy of a book and a knockout for the conscience of the soul. Not only does it explore the deep, darker recesses of the heart that are often filled with regret and self-loathing, but it examines humanity, humanity in all its raw coarseness, inelegance, frailties, shortcomings, and tragedies.