"Sophie's Choice" is a courageous, in some ways masterly book, a book very hard to review for the simple reason that the plot—even the double entendre in the title—cannot be given away. Certain things can be said without too much harming the novel's considerable effect: The story treats two doomed lovers, Nathan Landau, a brilliant, tragically mad New York Jew, and Sophie Zawistowska, a beautiful Polish survivor of Auschwitz, and their intellectual and emotional ent...

Sophie's Choice is an ambiguous, masterful, and enormously satisfying novel. It reconstructs Auschwitz, the ultimate system of falsehood organized, from the vantage point of the commandant's house, and perceives its litanies to human degradation through an appalling, ordinary focus of daily life. The extermination of the "undesirable" is measured in terms of their clothes piled in the laundry, and the stench of the smoke from the crematorium. Auschwitz is order imposed on quintes...

[In Sophie's Choice Styron] tries to address himself simultaneously to some of the fundamental issues of his own life as a writer and to a central dilemma of the moral history of our century. The novel he has shaped to confront these urgent questions is remarkably compelling, eloquent at its best, but not altogether satisfying—perhaps chiefly because the intertwined stories of a writer's coming of age and the meditation on the horrors of the Nazi death camps generate more static than re...

[Sophie's Choice] is divided into two parts that are not very closely stitched together. The Stingo-Sophie-Nathan relationship is one part, Sophie's life in Auschwitz as she tells it to Stingo the other, and the Auschwitz passages are much more vivid and convincing than the scenes from American life circa 1947. If the camps cannot be satisfactorily treated in terms of Zolaesque naturalism (no novelist has yet succeeded in this), what technique can suggest their horror, and convey something of ...

[Much of Sophie's Choice is concerned with Sophie's experiences in Auschwitz-Birkenau] and the diabolical choice she is forced to make there. There is another, sunnier subplot, concerning Stingo's efforts to rid himself of his virginity, which shows that Styron can do superbly what the young Philip Roth did well…. Some reviewers have taken exception with the manner of the narration of this novel. Stingo tells the story in the first-person, and the telling of them usually seems to...