Journey to the End of Hell

If rich novels, ambitious and successful, the "Sophie's Choice" is one. For if the description of the Nazi hell is essential, it is not the only nearby.
Let's start with history. In 1947, Stingo, a young Virginian writer 22 years uprooted in Brooklyn, met a couple of the neighbors noisy lovemaking and domestic disputes, Sophie and Nathan.
Sophie is a Polish immigrant survivor of Auschwitz, beautiful, sweet, sensitive, refined, so cheerful, so sad. Nathan is a Jewish New Yorker thirtysomething biology researcher, brilliant, funny, charming but with a dark side, violent and disturbing. Stingo will become the friend of Sophie and Nathan ...
"Sophie's Choice" is built on the superposition of three themes.
The first is the highly autobiographical account of Stingo, his professional tribulations, love, sex. With 40 years on, we immediately think of the verve of the young John Fante of "Ask the Dust" less dirty and more erotic.
The second is the torrid love affair, wonderful and violent Nathan and Sophie with Stingo is the observer. It is a new approach to the theme well conducted so often explored passionate love.
The third theme is the concentration camp past Sophie, his struggle to save her children and survive in horror. Styron gives us an outstanding and brilliant synthesis of "If This Is a Man" by Primo Levi and memoirs of Rudolf Hoess, the SS boss of Auschwitz. The monstrous inhumanity of the death camps is dissected with a scalpel. His approach to the Holocaust, one of the first written by a non-actor, is immense intelligence and originality, with, in the background, in parallel light of Nazi hatred and the condition of blacks in the South racist.

Lenchaînement the three themes that this novel is exceptional.
What audacity! Dare to mix sexual frustrations of youth and Auschwitz, and pass the ...
Styron cap equaled his talent to build this essential novel and write a nice fluid and pen. Should we say more?
Read this unforgettable book