Sophie's Choice

Watching Sophie's Choice was like visiting a familiar place you haven't been in awhile and seeing old friends. The cinematic recreation was just how I envisioned everything from the book. The Pink Palace was the industrial surplus navy pink I envisioned, the rooms spacious and warm, Sophie's and Nathan's apartment made precious with the gramophone, her silky robes and changing screen.
I was prompted to watch Sophie's Choice by a recent article in the New Yorker by Styron's daughter, recounting her years growing up in New York, the daughter of a successful, well regarded author. Reading Sophie's Choice you know Stingo is a young Styron, but according to Ms. Styron, Nathan is who Styron was to become; plagued by depression, Styron passed away just over a year ago. Ms. Styron wrote of the society types that came to her house growing up. Her parents welcomed everyone and a party was never more than 30 seconds away, not unlike Sophie's and Nathan's imaginary fetes, the calm before the storm.
The two sides of Styron were well portrayed by McNichol and Kline and in a sense, really emphasized the turn from naivete to striking and debilitating knowledge of love, sex and life. As in the book, the viewer (who is also Stingo) is made uncomfortable by Nathan and Sophie's love, by their furious fights, and by their lying (and ultimately, by Sophie's truth). But even as we realize Sophie's fate, Stingo remains in the dark, asking Sophie to marry him and have a family with him. Even though Sophie is less than 10 years younger than Stingo, she might as well be a lifetime older.
Ms. Styron admitted that due to the frankness and candidness of Sophie's Choice, she didn't read it at all growing up, but watched the movie over and over. In my mind, the book has more depth by far. It references literary works by Thomas Wolfe and Emily Dickinson that the movie only touches on and Stingo's father and his family's slave owning past are mentioned briefly if at all. But the movie held it's own. I'll give it 5 netflix stars.

The Year of Magical Thinking and Sophie's Choice

I am a terrible procrastinator and have always been. I distinctly remember my dad taking me to the public library the day before my 5th grade report on India was due, and neglected to send back my housing request form before the start of college, so that I was one of a group of students who had to live in a hotel for the first semester. Before my friend Jane left for the Peace Corps-- a year and a half ago-- she let me take her library of books, and while it was a big pile, I had visions of being able to finish them all before her return. At this point, I've read about two, one of which, Sophie's Choice, by William Styron, I just finished.

Besides being a Jane Book, my other reason for chosing this book was that Joan Didion referenced it in The Year of Magical Thinking. I generally demur from books (and movies) that are surefire tearjerkers, but I had heard such wonderful things about The Year of Magical Thinking that I reserved it at the library. And then forgot about it until an email arrived saying it was ready to pick up. I decided to just get it over with, even if it was depressing, but through reading it, came to identify and empathize with Ms. Didion. Throughout the year following the death of her husband and multiple hospitalizations of her daughter, she references many current days with the same day the year prior-- for example, while covering the Democratic National Convention in Boston, realizes it is her daughter's wedding anniversary, and recalls her, her husband's and her daughter's activities on that date...so different from her current, solitary experience, that she cannot bear to continue her Convention coverage. This intimate confession is one of many similar she makes throughout, and made me smile, not because of any innate humor, but because I could see myself doing the same thing. She recounts a trip to the grocery store she made on the day her daughter was hospitalized, and the receipt lists a handful of modest and meaningless items bought in the face of the profound. I can go through my emails I sent on September 11, 2001, well after I knew about the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, and see that I signed up for a Friendster account, of all things.

Ms. Didion's husband had been re-reading Sophie's Choice around the time of his death, and in that book, the narrator/participant, Stingo, ministers his own Magical Thinking. Stingo goes to post WWII New York, from the South, and meets Sophie, an Auschwitz survivor, and her lover, Nathan, an American Jew. Stingo is naive both by age (an admitted 10 years younger, at 22, than Sophie) and experience (a virgin, not particularly well traveled or knowledegable about non-Southerners).

Stingo interjects Sophie's confessorial backstory (the fate of her anti-semitic father and husband, her and her children's own fate within the concentration camp), as well as her current story (arriving in America to meet her manic depressive soul mate, Nathan), with his own, if not mundane, then innocent, trials and tribulations. Accidents and mores of the era are reported on, and backlashed against with the same urgency and weight as Sophie's own drama. For each carefree, but frustratingly (for Stingo) puritanical girl he meets, we hear Sophie's own stories of lovers chosen by literally, life and death situations. Stingo builds up a personal crisis, only to have it comically contrasted to Sophie's mind and life numbing traumas-- does his father's altercation with a cab driver and subsequent (accidental) black eye really compare to the abuse Sophie suffers at the hands of Nathan?

Stingo does, however, appreciate the gravity of Sophie's experience to his own; on the day she arrived at Auschwitz, he recalls he was eating bananas to "make weight" for recruitment into the armed forces. And ultimately, Stingo too harbors a secret-- his family's slave holding past has allowed him the funds to spend a summer writing, without working a 9-5 office job. While wet behind the ears as the main narrative takes place, the mature narrator Stingo alludes that the events of that summer not only allowed him to tackle the bulk of the book he wrote, but allowed him to part with his own past and find his own place in history.

Netflix stars-- 5 out of 5 for both books. Next up, a continuation on the same thread... Cane River by Lalita Tademy, chronicling generations of slaves in Louisiana. But first, the dishes and laundry I've put off while reading...