Sophie's choice – William Styron
Sophie's Choice is a novel by American writer William Stellan, first published in 1979. In 1980, the work won the inaugural National Book Award.
The novel takes the life experience of sophie, a Polish migrant and a queen, as the main line, interweaving and describing her deep, warm, deformed, perverted, and noisy love tragedy with the American Jew Nathan, as well as the love entanglement with the novel's narrator, the young southern writer Stingo, vividly and profoundly revealing the disastrous destruction of the spirit and flesh of the people brought by the Second World War, ruthlessly exposing the heinous inside story of the German fascist concentration camps, and accusing the Nazis of the crime of killing innocents.
The world is diverse. Just as evil is evil and vicious and mediocre, the victims and rebels are not all the same as the thousands of people who are preached in textbooks. This book provides such a new perspective on interpretation.
For the Jews, the anti-Semitic Poles are certainly evil – to be fair, it was not the Polish family that held this position in Europe for thousands of years; when the Westward Nazis were encountered, Poland also met their evil people; and those who stayed out of the way when all this happened and held high the banner of nationality and human rights after all this, how could it not be evil in the eyes of the first two?
The title of the book is brilliant, and Sophie doesn't seem to be the kind of fate that is knifed by man, and she always has a choice: when she first arrived at Auschwitz, she had a choice between her son and daughter; in the concentration camp, she had a choice between surviving and helping the resistance; in The United States, she had a choice between two admirers—or rather, two ways of life. But does she really have a choice? Whichever the children choose, it is nothing more than to go first and then go; if they do not resist, they are nothing more than to linger for a few days; no matter which man they choose, the nightmare memory is like a shadow. It is not so much that she has a choice, but that she, or thousands of people of that era, has no way to retreat.
Sophie's three names are also quite meaningful. In the eyes of the Jewish supremacists, she is the original sin Ava, the nationalists see her as Zoya, where is the real Sufi herself who is not attached to anyone, any identity?