|
Loading... Sophie's Choicepor William Styron
Recomendações do LibraryThingRecomendações de membros
A carregar...
não
provavelmente não
provavelmente sim
sim
adorará Adira ao LibraryThing para descobrir se gostará deste livro. I hate this book. I tried for over 3 months to swallow this slop and made it to page 96. Styron's writing is horrid! It takes him a paragraph to say a sentence, several pages to make a point. It's ridiculous. The vocabulary diarrhea is unappealing. I don't even know where the plot was going. So, I gave up. I'm glad I never had to read this for any classes. (  ) FMRox | Dec 21, 2009 |  One of the most well-written book I've read to date, Sophie's Choice is like a Beethoven symphony - perhaps Pastorale was in Styron's mind while he wrote the novel, as that title came up more than once as I recall - and one needs to take care reading it to comprehend how truly remarkable this book is. I thought, through most of the pages, that the choice in Sophie's Choice refers to the fact that Sophie tangles with two men in her life and she has a choice to make. Of course, I was fooled through 500 plus pages of wading through heavy but incredibly beautiful and stunning prose until that powerful and shocking revelation. I did find the book thick at times, especially through the middle, but I was drawn deeply to Styron's mastery of words. I found myself wanting to learn from the work, not just its wealth of fresh words, but the shrewdness in the way Styron sees and describes things, his approach, and everything else about his process as a writer, which he so cleverly encapsulates in Stingo's character. I loved the many references to classical music and literature. It's not easy to finish, but it's an important book to read and I believe it's one of the best books I've read. (  )1  siafl | Nov 7, 2009 | My first umambiguous thought is that I really, really liked this book. And I almost feel guilty saying that, because the subject matter was so heavy and sad, that it feels wrong to say that I enjoyed reading it. Yes, there were some parts that were very sad, and shocking, and horrible, but Styron kept you on your toes as a reader, waiting until the very end to find out the truth about Sophie and Nathan, revealing things piece by piece, getting to the very core of his characters and their experiences. The characters were all multi-dimensional and easy to sympathize with, even Nathan, once I learned that he was psychotic and on drugs and couldn't really help his horrible behavior. They were all characters that came from broken places. The writing was beautiful and I was sucked in from page one. I haven't read any books on the Holocaust, and in fact on our family vacation to Washington, DC last month, actively campaigned to skip the Holocaust Museum, knowing how gut-wrenching it would be to see, or even learn about any of that. Now I am sorry I missed it. I had no idea that the Holocaust affected so many people of all ages, and not all of them Jewish or German. What I found most interesting at many times during the book was how Styron would take Nazi characters like Hoss, his daughter Emmi, or the doctor on the platform, reveal them one moment as unfeeling automatons who believed and did as they were commanded, but then in the next paragraph would show something of their humanity, showing that even inside terrible people is something human we can relate to. Everyone in the book had a dirty secret or guilt that they were trying to live with, whether they were Nazi or not. In the end, we're all human and imperfect. I am reading my way through the Modern Library's Top 100 Board's books, and out of Books 100-96, it was the only one so far that I sank into and never wanted to resurface. Totally recommended. (  )1 Socrmom78 | Oct 9, 2009 | Ik vind de film met Meryl Streep, één van mijn favoriete actrices, geweldig. Maar het boek is eigenlijk nog beter. Prima karakters, sfeerbeschrijving en tijdsbeeld. (  ) biebfilmpie | Sep 30, 2009 | I read this (sort of) once before, in 1985 after seeing the movie. I remember I was traveling on a plane from New Mexico (where I lived at the time) to Seattle (to visit family). I had the book on the plane & had been reading it, but having a hard time with it & when I left the plane I left the book without finishing it. Leaving a book behind is extremely unusual for me - I never go anywhere without a book & I just about always finish just about everything. I decided that I just wasn't meant to read this book if I'd left it behind. I was 22. I had equal trouble with Lie Down in Darkness - just couldn't get through it. I loved his book on his own struggles with depression - Darkness Visible - I thought it was one of the truest pieces of writing about depression that I had ever read. I figured eventually I'd get back to his fiction. I picked up Sophie's Choice again as part of a reading challenge - to read some American prize winning books & compare them. I'm glad I did. This one won the National Book Award. Styron can write & he can tell a story - painful though it may be. I loved the craft of this book, the interplay of language & the brick-by-brick-by-word-by-word deftness of his creations - Stingo, Sophie, & Nathan & long ago far away Brooklyn. As much a meditation on his younger days as a fledgling writer as it is a Holocaust story, this novel is also a Southerner's rumination on what it means to be Southern, to be liberal, to have lived through the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis & to see similar horrors perpetrated in your home (see also, slavery & lynchings). There are aspects of this book that remind me very clearly of North Toward Home - Willie Morris' wonderful memoir about being a Southerner among Northern intellectuals. Styron beautifully captures Stingo's naivete & self-conscious youth as he struggles with his first novel. Equally well-drawn are the doomed Nathan & Sophie - their mutual histories of madness & despair intertwined in fatal & beautiful ways. It is worth remembering that more than Europe's Jews were caught up in the Nazi insanity - Sophie's story is just one of many. This is a difficult, painful & ultimately worthwhile novel. Read it - you won't regret it. ( ) kraaivrouw | May 20, 2009 |  sem resenhas | adicionar uma resenha
Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0099483521, Paperback)"[One morning] in the early spring, I woke up with the remembrance of a girl I'd once known, Sophie. It was a very vivid half-dream, half-revelation, and all of a sudden I realized that hers was a story I had to tell." That very day, William Styron began writing the first chapter of Sophie's Choice.First published in 1979, this complex and ambitious novel opens with Stingo, a young southerner, journeying north in 1947 to become a writer. It leads us into his intellectual and emotional entanglement with his neighbors in a Brooklyn rooming house: Nathan, a tortured, brilliant Jew, and his lover, Sophie, a beautiful Polish woman whose wrist bears the grim tattoo of a concentration camp...and whose past is strewn with death that she alone survived. "Sophie's Choice is a passionate, courageous book...a philosophical novel on the most important subject of the twentieth century," said novelist and critic John Gardner in The New York Times Book Review. "One of the reasons Styron succeeds so well in Sophie's Choice is that, like Shakespeare (I think the comparison is not too grand), Styron knows how to cut away from the darkness of his material, so that when he turns to it again it strikes with increasing force....Sophie's Choice is a thriller of the highest order, all the more thrilling for the fact that the dark, gloomy secrets we are unearthing one by one--sorting through lies and terrible misunderstandings like a hand groping for a golden nugget in a rattlesnake's nest--may be authentic secrets of history and our own human nature." The Modern Library has played a significant role in American cultural life for the better part of a century. The series was founded in 1917 by the publishers Boni and Liveright and eight years later acquired by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer. It provided the foun-dation for their next publishing venture, Random House. The Modern Library has been a staple of the American book trade, providing readers with affordable hard-bound editions of important works of liter-ature and thought. For the Modern Library's seventy-fifth anniversary, Random House redesigned the series, restoring as its emblem the running torchbearer created by Lucian Bernhard in 1925 and refurbishing jackets, bindings, and type, as well as inau- gurating a new program of selecting titles. The Modern Library continues to provide the world's best books, at the best prices. (retirado da Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:57:52 -0400) A primeira ronda de testes foi já encerrada. Visite o grupo Open Shelves Classification para mais informação. |
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
