Mid-Book Review - Sophie's Choice

Getting through the first two chapters of William Styron's Sophie's Choice was a bit of a chore. Thank goodness I knew Kelly and I were in it together, otherwise I might have put it down. We weren't even introduced to Sophie until the third chapter, where we finally got into the main plot.

Now that I'm just over half-way through it, I can honestly say that there is no way this will be on my favorite book list. I know - I haven't finished it yet, and supposedly I'll need to break out the tissue in the end, but it's not a particularly easy read! First off, the writing is extremely verbose. For example, this passage:

She took his dictation with care, but because of his runaway fervor, in some haste, so it was not until she got down to the job of typing it out for the printer that she began to glimpse seething in that cauldron of historical allusions and dialectical hypotheses and religious imperatives and legal precedents and anthropological propositions the smoky, ominous presence of a single word--repeated several times--which quite baffled and confounded and frightened her, appearing as it did in this otherwise persuasively practical text, this clever polemic which voiced with breezily scurrilous mockery the sly propaganda she had half heard more than once...

Come on - baffled AND confounded AND frightened her? All in the same, already extremely long sentence?! I just find it a bit unnecessary and completely frustrating.

In addition to the flowery prose, the narrator, Stingo, jumps around within the story line. We learn about Sophie through his eyes - how they meet, her background, their growing friendship, then back to her background, a jump into the future for a walk down memory line, then back into her history with edits on things she had lied about or left out of the original stories. It makes it confusing at times and is another frustrating aspect of the book as a whole.

The last piece that puts me over the edge are the literary references and what are basically book reviews scattered throughout the story. Stingo himself is an aspiring author and so refers to various other accomplished authors and poets frequently. While I am not a literary scholar, I do recognize at least the names of many authors in general even if I don't know what they have written. However, Stingo refers to authors that I have never heard of and expects me, the reader, to know what writing style or genre he is speaking of when making said references. Oy vey!

I'm going to stick with it to learn what Sophie's unbearable secret is - that solitary choice that seemingly defined her (and the book!) We'll just have to wait to see what all the fuss is about...and I guess it's in the second half of the book because it certainly isn't in the first half.