Sophie's Choice [review]
 Author: William Styron |
A truly astounding novel, which I devoured in one six-hour sitting in a cafe on campus, to a veritable blitzkrieg of hail and snow outside. William Styron has a delightful locution, and a most enviably dry wit about his prose. Everything about his writing is perfectly delivered, but it's not all laughter. You have only to read his slow building up of the characters - Sophie, in particular - peeling away layer by layer with his incisive narrative, until the startling, brutal denouement is revealed with a gut-wrenching flourish, to acknowledge if not adore the breadth of this literary accomplishment. Sophie's Choice is capable of taking one from tears to laughter back to tears again, within the space of a chapter - even a page. It's about the Holocaust. An overwrought theme, perhaps, but Sophie's Choice is a profound rendering of it, horrific, hilarious, intimate, heartwarming at once. One for the bookshelf - or mine, at least. |