Sophie's Choice

I finally know what terrible choice Sophie had to make. She had to choose which of her two children to be sent to the crematorium in Auschwitz, while the other one lives in the camp. She chose to keep her son, Jan, and her 7-year-old daughter Eva was taken away. Though her son probably also died later in the children's camp, a fate that Sophie never found out.

I watched the movie before finishing the book, and it was the saddest movie I have ever watched. Heart wrenching is the only word I can think of now, and it truly is because the story was based on real people. Sophie was real, Nathan was real, the children were real.

Nathan, oh Nathan. He was a great character, and it was sad that he was also real. A man of utmost intelligent, he can be anyone and anything he chose to be. But he was born a paranoid schizophrenic and it was the 1940s. It was not the lack of medicine advancement or the lack of money that drove him madder though; it was the drugs. It was a time of sex and drugs and freedom, as the book suggested; black lynchings and Holocaust had just come to pass. But Nathan was an addict, so whether his manic behaviour was due to the drugs or the condition of his illness, I do not know. So he was cursed as much as he was blessed.

I imagine if he was not afflicted with the illness, he might have been an exceptional man, and might still be alive. Like Stingo said, how can you fail to have the most helpless crush on such a generous mind? Nathan was utterly, fatally glamourous.

And he was perfectly portrayed as such by Kevin Kline, just as Sophie was successfully brought alive by Meryl Streep. Perhaps the success was also because of her accents, her seemingly flawless German and her broken English. And I suspect this movie was the beginning of Peter MacNicol's being constantly recognized as the intelligent but naive and innocent character, although that might have grown even more through his character in Ally McBeal.

Sophie would not have been alive were it not for Nathan and in the end she made another choice, to stay with him.