Disclaimer : This is not a book review. I am sharing, rather purging all the emotional upheaval I went through while reading this book.
Freesoul, I don't know whether to strangle you or hug you for suggesting this book to me. But you did, and I bought it, and I am glad, and I am drained. So here goes to you!!!
*"How To"
The Death mask is prepared
from the negative of the face.
After the soul has left, cover
the face with soft clay,
then peel it off, slowly.
In it, you get a large mold;
instead of the nose a h0le,
instead of the eye sockets two blobs.
Now pour the plaster, premixed,
into the mold, wait
till it hardens,
then separate the parts:
in the positive, the nose juts out again,
the eyesockets collapse.Now
take the plaster face
and cover your face of flesh with it
and live.
---- Dan Pagis
Sophie's Choice, two innocent words... The novel starts in a very inncouous way, with Stingo as the narrator, telling us how he goes from working at McGraw Hill to being an aspiring writer in Brooklyn.He moves to a building, where he is drawn into the lives of Nathan a Jew, and Sophie, a Pole; who are fellow inhabitants of the building. The two are involved in an intense, emotional and difficult relationship. Sophie is a survivor (?) of the concentration camps of World War II, and Nathan is a biologist who has plenty of financial resources. They seem to be leading the perfect American life, full of happiness. Nathan and Sophie met when she had come to America, and he seems to give her true happiness, when he is not flying into seemingly unreasonable rages, accusing Sophie of being disloyal to him. There are times when it seems there is no one more affectionate than Nathan, and then he flows into one of his jealous rages, which make one wonder if all is as it seems? Nathan, however, has his own ghosts to deal with, what with his suppressed ( most of the time) resentment for Sophie, for the treatment meted out to Jews by the Poles.
As the story goes on, Sophie tells Stingo about her past, things which she has done her best to supress in the deep recesses of her mind. She speaks about her father whom she hated, the husband she never loved, her arrest by Nazis for smuggling ham to her sick mother, and her young son Jan, for whose survival she tried to seduce Rudolph Hos, a commander of Auschwitz. She, however, never learnt what happened to her son. Sophie tells Stingo all the inhuman decisions she took, all the compromises she made, just in order to survive. Interspersed are the demons Stingo has to face, what with his growing love/lust for Sophie, his desperate desire to lose his virginity, and his own confusion between his Southern roots and Northern lure. In fact, one welcomes the interludes in Stingo's life with almost grateful relief. Throughout the book, Sophie's intense depression, her guilt at having survived the inhuman experience, and her anger with a God who has apparently forsaken her is so palpable, so tangible, it seems to reach out to ensnare you.
Sophie's Choice is a novel which grips you, it suffocates you, yet you can't let go of it. Styron skillfully navigates between the past and the present, what with Sophie and Nathan's tale and Sophie's recount of the concentration camp. He takes us through many themes – the worst abuses of the American South, namely Slavery, Nazi anti-Semitism, humankind’s immense capability for evil and suffering, the Holocaust with the treatment of Jews and Slavs, mental illness, love, hate, violence, survival in the wartime ruins of Warsaw, and the intense suffering of Sophie and Nathan. The novel leaves you with a heavy heart, rather it does not leave you at all.
My thoughts :
I was emotionally drained while reading this novel. While I was aware of Holocaust, and all that the term implies, I had never ever thought of what an experience like that could do to the survivors. I never thought what would happen to the human psyche when it has to wonder about its survival day after day, hour after hour. We all, who take such pride in our integrity, our feelings of compassion for our fellow human beings, we whose hearts are so full of compassion, we dont know how it feels to be glad when someone else is taken to a gas chamber instead. What feeling would prevail when you are praying desperately for someone else's death, guilt, relief, hope, or a numbness?How can one even hope when one knows that its just a matter of chance, would one be glad of having gotten another day to live through the same mental torture, the same emotional see-saw, or would one approach death with a pleasure? In a haunting recount, Sophie says,
"People acted very differently in the camp, some in a cowardly and selfish way, some bravely and beautifully - there was no rule. But such a terrible place was this Auschwitz, Stingo, terrible, beyond all belief, that you really could not say that this person should have done a certain thing in a fine or a noble fashion, as in the other world. If he or she done a noble thing, then you could admire them like any place else, but Nazis were murderers and when they were not murdering they turned people into sick animals, so if what people done was not so noble, or even was like animals, then you have to understand it, hating it maybe but pitying it at the same time, because you knew how easy it was for you to act like an animal too."
We all place our faith in God, or a supreme power, but I wonder in such a place, does faith survive? Does one wonder what he has done that God has forsaken him? What did so many people do that God turned away from them? When we are hounded by the world, when the little burdens seem too heavy to carry, we retreat inside ourselves. But if the psyche is scarred, when one has bottled all the guilt, all the depression, everything deep inside, where does one then retreat to? The psyche, in an attempt for the human to go on, blanks certain experiences out, but what happens when it all comes rushing back? How does one forgive the others? How does one forgive oneself? These are questions that I guess will never be answered. One just goes on, with a mask of happiness on one's face and psyche, waiting and dreading the time when the mask comes off.
