Sophie's Choice
William Styron
Language: English
Pages: 576
ISBN: 0679736379
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Three stories are told: a young Southerner wants to become a writer; a turbulent love-hate affair between a brilliant Jew and a beautiful Polish woman; and of an awful wound in that woman's past--one that impels both Sophie and Nathan toward destruction.
know, and I could see the smoke from the ovens at Birkenau coming down over the fields and the woods. Then Höss came in.” Lucky Sophie. It is remarkable to contemplate, but at this point in her career at the camp, six months after her arrival, she was not only in fairly good health but had been spared most of the worst pangs of starvation. This hardly meant any abundance, however. Whenever she reminisced about that period (and she rarely dwelt on it in any great detail, so I never got from her
his own illustrious repute as a scholar and an expert in his field. He is also a man of considerable social facility. Nonetheless, Sophie can tell that he is flattered beyond measure to be near the flesh of this titan, and his eagerness to please falls a hair short of the outright embarrassing. There is no professional connection to this meeting; the encounter is purely social, recreative. Dürrfeld with his wife is making a vacation trip through Eastern Europe, and a mutual acquaintance in
culture, in one after another frantically gemütlich display of palship: Blackstock with a popeyed Eddie Cantor, Blackstock with Grover Whalen, with Sherman Billingsley and Sylvia at the Stork Club, with Major Bowes, with Walter Winchell, even Blackstock with the Andrews Sisters, the three songbirds with their plentiful hair closely surrounding his face like large grinning bouquets, the doctor poutingly proud above the inked scrawl: Love to Hymie from Patty, Maxene and LaVerne. In the morbid,
nigger—Knee-grow—slave I owned, that was sold... ” But I thought this might provoke Nathan into thinking I was pulling his leg; he might then embark again upon his monologue, which was becoming a trifle exhausting, so I merely smiled thinly, wrapping myself in an enigma, and replied, “I have a private source of income.” “You’re a writer?” he said again, earnestly and with obvious enthusiasm. Shaking his head back and forth as if with the minor marvel of it all, he leaned across Sophie’s lap and
out at the University Residence Club a furious little fist, a darling angry fist so prominent, so bloodlessly agitated that it seemed impossible that she was not brandishing it a scant inch from my nose. I felt illumined as if by a spotlight, and in my pounding chagrin I was certain that I could read her lips: “If only that goddamned eyesore weren’t there, with all those creeps peering out at us!” But my torment on Eleventh Street was not fated to be prolonged. It would have been satisfying to