About this title: The heroine of Styron's novel is based on a Polish survivor of Auschwitz he knew when he lived in a Brooklyn rooming house in the late 1940s. The narrator--in the tradition of Fitzgerald's Nick Carraway in THE GREAT GATSBY--is Stingo, the young Southern writer who falls in love with Sophie, his upstairs neighbor, and tells her dramatic story and that of Nathan, the mad genius who loves her but is obsessed with the horrors of the Holocaust.
Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Edition: Trade ed.
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Random House
Date Published: 1979
ISBN-13:9780394461090ISBN:0394461096
Description: Good in good dust jacket. DJ has very minor shelf wear, binding is tight and square, pages are unmarked but page edges are discolored. Sewn binding. Cloth over boards. 515 p. Audience: General/trade. read more
Description: Good. Nice copy! INT: slightly stained page edges, no rips, tears, bent page corners, or markings of any kind. EXT: edge wear, spine creases, cover scuffs. read more
Edition: Trade ed.
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Random House
Date Published: 1979
ISBN-13:9780394461090ISBN:0394461096
Description: Very good in good dust jacket. Light edge and corner wear. Previous owner's name and inscription inside. Price clipped on inside of dj. Remainder mark on top and bottom of book. Dj has some edge wear on top edge. Sewn binding. Cloth over boards. 515 p. Audience: General/trade. read more
Binding: Mass-market paperback
Publisher: Bantam Books
Date Published: 1980
ISBN-13:9780553209679ISBN:0553209671
Description: Good. No dust jacket as issued. Light edge and corner wear. Spine creases. Previous owner's name inside. Cover creases. Mass market (rack) paperback. Glued binding. Audience: General/trade. read more
Binding: Mass-market paperback
Publisher: Bantam Books
Date Published: 1983
ISBN-13:9780553209679ISBN:0553209671
Description: Good. No dust jacket as issued. Nice soft cover, lightly read, shelf wear to cover, light creases on spine, bend on bottom corner of front cover, light aging, stk #2168sl7. Mass market (rack) paperback. Glued binding. Audience: General/trade. read more
Binding: Mass-market paperback
Publisher: Bantam Books
Date Published: 1980
ISBN-13:9780553135459ISBN:0553135457
Description: Good. No dust jacket as issued. Tight copy. Owner's name in front, pages tanned and otherwise unmarked. No stains or tears. Cover intact but has wear with scuffs, scratches, edgewear and some discoloration. Spine is creased and has some curl. Sound copy. Mass market (rack) paperback. Glued binding. 627 p. read more
"Putting aside for a moment my dislike at giving this wholly new kind of novel (though decades old) the same rating as a fellow reader of mine who frequents this site, I'll deal with my reservations first.
This great tale, starting with young "Stingo" in Brooklyn, weaves in and out of Flatbush and Poland and Washington, DC and Virginia and a few more places I'm probably forgetting. The desultory nature of it is, besides the superfluous and poetically gratuitous sex vignettes, the main flaw. After all, it starts at a publishing house, with our narrator ensconced irritably in some hole in the Village, then leaves this setting immediately to depart to the otherworldy "Pink Palace" apartment block in Brooklyn. I have to say I missed Stingo's days as a jaundiced manuscript reader, and it made the missing harder to get over since it leaves you about 75 pages into a 564 page novel.
But the writing is unlike anything I've read. It's hard to pin down. Surely some Faulkner in there but some of the sentences had the jazzy juiced up feel of something out of Kerouac. Out of nowhere the stiff poetry of Hemingway would do a peekaboo. I think then finally it's a testament to the greatness that Styron has his own sound, however indefinable that sound comes across as a style.
The story is after all terribly moving and even more so if you allow yourself to read it in enormous chunks. This is not a novel to nibble on. There is so much crammed in there, musings on race, and that awful aberration, the holocaust.
Read it before someone tells you to see the movie."
"This was a hard book for me to rate, because one part of the story (Sophie's history), I was totally intrigued by and it kept me guessing and really grabbed me. The "present" part of the story was really boring for me. I didn't really care about the Nathen/Stingo/Sophie drama and just wanted to skip to the parts about Sophie's past.
The thing that kept annoying me though was just how over-written the whole book was. It was like he was trying to hard to write a "great" novel and just lost touch with what it was he was doing. He was writing really emotional things in this really distant way and it made it hard for me to connect with the characters even through really tough stuff.
I also felt like he just took on too many issues. It felt like he wanted to fit everything he'd ever really cared about into one book. I wish he had picked a couple of topics and stuck with those and done them well.
Maybe I went into this with too high expectations, but I was disappointed."
"I stuck with it out of curiosity, not so much to find out what her choice was, but because this is supposedly an important American novel and I kept waiting for the "Aha!" moment when it would finally get good. To me it was just way too long. I now know what it's like to suffer from too much foreshadowing. It was so tiresome reading hint after ominous hint about what was going to happen.
The narration was clumsy and over-explanatory. Do you really have to recap an event that you just narrated 50 pages anterior? Did Styron think the audience too dumb to remember the episode well enough to comprehend an explicit allusion or (god forbid) an oblique reference? Do you really have to hammer home over and over again how frustrated he is to not be having sex, just to build up one of the last scenes? I'll grant that it might have been intentional to create a narrator so unsympathetic and annoying, but the result was irritation and a hesitance to continue reading. Another problem with the narration was Sophie's narrative about Auschwitz. There were several moments when you saw the quotes around the paragraphs, indicating she was talking, but it was grammatically perfect. It was, as I already said, clumsy, and I can only suppose it was poor planning. Styron clearly wanted to eat his cake and have it too.
There were some pretty passages mixed in. Most of the good stuff revolved around the Auschwitz narrative and the observations it afforded Styron to make about human nature and the nature of hellish war. There were some good analogies, particularly the rats-in-barrel (Jews) vs. rats-in-burning-building (all other victims). Of course, this reaffirms my opinion that this could have been a much better book by cutting out 2-300 pages. I'm just going to assume that most of the "staggering," and "masterful" touches (two adjectives employed in the praise section of the edition I read) to this work were over my head."
"Forget the movie! Read the book! I think this is one of the best books I have ever read. When I first read it, about two years ago, it totally inhabited my mind and even now, two years later, scenes from the book keep drifting through my head. No wonder William Styron is celebrated-- this book is amazing. And amazing on so many levels. First of all, Styron engages just about every emotion there is-- some of this book contained some of the funniest scenes I think I've every read, some descend into the pits of horror, he taps our full emotional range and yet it all seems easy and natural. He seamlessly weaves the autobiographical story of a young Southerner coming to New York to be a "great writer", his experiences as a Marine in WWII, the burden of Southern racism, his relationship to his father, dating and love as a 20-something newly arrived in New York, and the numerous wacky and wild characters he meets, including Sophie, the Polish Catholic concentration camp survivor and her boyfriend the brilliant, charming, but apparently manic/depressive Nathan. The writing flows easy and naturally, yet I think is brilliant in its apparent simple straightforwardness. The descriptions live in my mind like photographs. But, most importantly, unlike some writers who seem to write because they want to be clever, rich, and get invited to New Yorker cocktail parties, this book feels like it comes straight from Styron's heart and soul."
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