Krishna
This is a famous book made into a famous movie. I normally like to read the book first, because you can savour it at your pace and also because you can imagine the story in your mind and not be influenced by the director’s vision. Enough of my tastes. Let us look at the story of this lovely book.
The narrator Stingo moves to Brooklyn in 1947. At twenty two, the person was aspiring to be a writer. The narrator was from Virginia and could not be controlled by the father after mother died and so was enrolled in a prep school in Virginia, when only fourteen years old. When the person got a job was fired in just five months and felt relieved about it.
He makes the junior editor in a large publishing house, the McGraw Hill. His job is really a manuscript reader, of the mundane variety too.
An old man called Firkin arrives and meets him in McGraw Hill, clutching the manuscript of a largish poetry book. The narrator rejects it, only to find it topping the bestseller list for a long time when published by a rival publisher. (It was the famous Kon-Tiki).
Anyway, he is told by the new manager that he will be let go and he leaves without regret. When he reveals his ambition to write to a coworker – as he is packing his belongings – the coworker talks about his son Eddie, who had a fantastic gift to be a writer. He had published his piece in magazines at the tender age of nineteen. The narrator wonders about the past tense used. He finds out that the son was killed in a posting (with the army) in Japan through a sniper bullet.
When he is pondering what to do next, his father sends about $500. It has an interesting back story. The grandfather of the narrator had bought three slaves – all part of a family – two girls called Lucinda and Drusilla, who were sisters, and then a brother called Artiste. When Artiste was twelve, a white girl accused him of improper advances, which riled up the town. So the grandfather sold him to a dealer, knowing that he would go to the plantations in Georgia for back breaking work. He got $200 for it, and converted it to gold coins and hid it.
It turns out that Artiste was falsely accused and the girl tried to repeat the same trick with another black slave and was found out. She confessed to the lie regarding Artiste too. Totally overcame by guilt, the grandfather tried to find and buy the boy back but to no avail. The other two stayed with the family, as servants after slavery was abolished.
The amount had increased in value but there were also a lot of claimants, so the narrator’s share came to just over $500 which he got from his father, who had finally found where the coins were stored and had it apprised.
Before then, he gets an apartment in Bronx but the couple upstairs are having noisy sex. The man, he learns is Nathan and the woman is Polish – She is Sophie.
Nathan has a god-aweful row with Sophie, and threatens to leave her for good. Stingo, who is already infatuated with her, comforts her platonically. Then the janitor Morris says how they made up and the next day morning, Sophie and Nathan force invite Stingo to go to the beach with them.
Going up for a beer, Stingo and Nathan get into an argument about the South. The lynching of Bobby Weed in the hands of Southerners like Stingo ‘for looking at a white girl’ and how all Southerners are culpable since they did not protest or prevent it. He compares it with Germans remaining passive while Jews were executed in Holocaust.
Then as quickly as it came, the anger dissipates, thanks to the cunning intervention of Sophie and they are friends again. Go to the beach. This brings to light, very subtly, the mercurial changes in moods of Nathan. Being able to be in the circle, despite his very real attraction to Sophie, is something that Stingo consoles himself as ‘better then nothing’.
Nathan, on his part, seems to be impressed that Stingo is an aspiring writer.
Later, Stingo learns of Sophie’s childhood in Poland. Born to University professors, fond of classical music, when Nazi’s took over Poland, she was incarcerated too (for being Polish not for being a Jew) and was emaciated when she was released. She wentS and stayed alond in Brooklyn, revelling on the wide variety of food and wide open spaces of America.
The author tells us why Stingo is sex starved. In the forties, women were coy and averse to ‘forward behaviour’ before marriage and the only sex he had had was with a bored and ageing prostitute. When he meets a girl Nathan had introduced (Leslie Lapidus) and she promises explicitly a meeting next week so that they can have sex, Stinge can hardly contain his impatience.
Now, Sophie met Nathan when she was living alone and went to the library. The librarian shouted at her and due to malnutrition, she fainted. Nathan comes across her, brings her back home and becomes friends. Helps her to a doctor for nutrition – his own brother is one – and helps her in other ways.
She tells him her backstory. How, by smuggling meat in 1943 she was caught and sent to Auschwitz. An interesting fact is that the twin camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau were used for separate purposes. The former for slave labour and the latter for pure extermination. Later, Birkenau also became a place where only Jews were killed. She survived the three years because she had better food and clothes than the average prisoner, and that because of her ffluency in German.
Towards the end, the privileges disappeared and she developed a host of health problems. Anemia, scurvy and scarlet fever.
Another diversion is how Nathan introduces her to a Jewish girl who whispers such erotic statements directly into Stingo’s ears that he is inflamed. She invites him to her house for ‘deep fucking’ and he cannot even wait. When he reaches there he finds that she is incredibly rich and that in the mansion they were to be alone. Their parents had to travel elsewhere and even the maid had the day off.
However, it turns into a disappointment.
Even these diversions, whether useful to the plot later on or not, are engrossing.
Another break from the story to give some overall impressions. A pause if you will. I think that the narration and the flow of language is as exquisite as the story itself and is a pleasure to read. Beautiful narration and the language is worth pausing over and savouring.
Each and every incident is explained in a language so appropriate that it enhances the story. For instance, Sophie’s lapsing into French words when she is describing emotional times.
The author digresses once more here – as the character being introduced this time is needed for the plot later – and talks about Rudolf Hoss, the person in charge of mass extermination of the Jews. He was an ex army man who fought in WW I but soon fell under the thrall of Adolf Hitler and during the Nazi regime, worked with the likes of Eichmann and Herman Hesse. As another interesting aside, it is interesting to see that the Auschwitz and many other concentration camps were completely operated by civilians and, Hoss notwithstanding, there were hardly any military men operating these camps.
It is shocking and fascinating to find that the people who killed Jews in huge numbers without compunction were ex carpenters, waitresses, post office clerks and manufacturers of musical instruments! The history’s greatest liquidator of Jews, Heinrich Himmler, was a chicken farmer.
Hoss writes of ‘misgivings’ but never once even thought of disobeying a direct order.
Meanwhile, a lot happens in the main thread. Nathan is at the cusp of discovery that can be a major scientific breakthrough and is excited. He asks Sophie to meet him and Stingo in the bar they frequent.
Sophie is thrilled and meets him early in the bar and tells him. Stingo is thrilled for Nathan. However, when Nathan went home to change, he hears from the janitor that her boss the chiropractor had gone with her to her apartment and rage enters his soul. From the descriptions, a modern reader like you would conclude that Nathan was bipolar, with alternate phases of euphoric mania and raging depression. Now Stingo, after returning from a trip to the bathroom, notices Nathan transform into an angry cruel man again, right in front of Stingo.
Stingo, regrettably, does not stand up to him or even try to pacify him. He runs off to the bathroom and when he is back, they are gone. He waits another three hours ‘to form a good plan’ even not meeting his father at the station, and then goes home to find that they both have permanently left. He is “in shock” that they did not leave a forwarding address and that both left in different directions – as told to him by the janitor.
Several years later, Stingo reminisces further. Sophie told him about the Commandant Hoss and her work in Auschwitz under him. She is also forced to reveal that contrary to what she had indicated to both Stingo and Nathan, her father was a confirmed anti Semite.
He had also fallen under the influence of German exceptionalism when he was in Vienna and concurred that Poland is best aligned with the mighty Germans. Sophie then realized that she hated her father! He was convinced that Jews were at the root of the godless Communism and subscribed whole heartedly to the National Socialist (fascist) doctrine.
Polish government, when it relaxed its strictures against anti Jewish violence gave him the gap he needed. He wrote numerous articles on the problem of ‘surplus jews’ and even went as a part of the Polish government team to Madagascar, to investigate if all Polish Jews can be resettled there.
When he gets to the concentration camp part, the author is brutally realistic. Even ‘favoured’ people like Sophie, under the care of Hoss, were starving for the leftover scraps of meat (actually gristle stuck to the bone) and savoured it as the best ever meal they have had. There is a very detailed and realistic description. Even Sophie, a secretary who had typed up orders for Hoss and watched as the Jews were sent to the camp and, if too feeble, straight to the gas chambers. The fabric confiscated from Jews (not necessarily the ones who came in but also theirs) was sticked by Jewish seamstresses into fashionable clothes for the Germans. The reward for this was their being allowed to stay alive.
She tries to persuade Hoss, at a considerable risk to herself that her father and she were Nazi sympathizers from the beginning. The attempt fails and so does her attempt to hint at seduction. Though Hoss desires her, he is too much of a puritan to make any moves. In face, since he is being transferred to Germany shortly, he sends her back to the pool where the risk of starvation and death are much higher. However, Sophie reveals that she had one kid, Jan, in the same camp and he was eight years old then. She persuades Hoss to just let her see him once. He refuses all other pleas from her to save her (transfer to a safer place or take her with him) or do anything else for her son.
Sophie comes back into Nathan’s life as he runs into her vacating the apartment. She tells him some of her life story, above, and also says that Nathan was a drug user, with serious drug problem. It is a shock to Stingo.
When she tells the story, she talks of Nathan’s excessive drug habits. Benzedine on top of cocaine and Sophie has heard from a friend that this alone could have been the cause of his occasional psychosis. He keeps two cyanide pills always so that he can take the way out, with Sophie of course, when it gets really tough. On top of it, he is pananoid and is seeing anti Semitic extermination attempt from unseen enemies plotting conspiracy everywhere in the world – including America.
She calmly tells Stingo all the physical and mental abuses she had endured time after time when Nathan flies high and gets upset. It is very difficult to watch. After she saved him from the police, he wants her to suck him off and in an earlier instance physically kicks her, bruising her ribcage and does unspeakable things. She seems to ensure everything, not even flinching when the kicks come. It is shocking, and it is horrifying to read this.
And after all that, he asks her for help to get back to the car because he is crashing. Hard. She obliges.
Also, since Sophie starts drinking excessively after Nathan’s exit, Stingo initially dismisses it as a hangover reaction from grief but soon begins to suspect that this may be an earlier habit revived now. Especially since she seems to have a prodigious capacity for alcohol without even slurring.
The great thing is this changing picture of Sophie’s past. Initially, she said she hated her father for Jew hatred. She talked about her time in Auschwitz. Then came the story of her son Jan. Then, when Nathan left, she started spewing venom on Jews saying that she lied earlier and she always hated Jews. Nathan did all he did for her so that he could beat her, use her and fuck her – not out of love or any higher sentiment.
She now reveals that she had a lover when she was married in Poland. A younger man called Jozef. Jozef was in the underground resistance and he killed the Polish people who betrayed the location of Jews in hiding to the Nazi regime.
She now reveals that she had another child, Eva in Poland and describes in detail how she got caught in a wide net spread by Gestapo to catch the Polish resistance (the meat smuggling part for her mother with consumption was true – at least until this version!). She was caught while trying to smuggle ham in a train tying it to the inside of her dress as though she was pregnant.
Sophie had in the past refused to help fellow resistance friend called Wanda whom she knew through Jozef. Even though she hated her father and husband, she used their deaths as an excuse not to help – even for just translating captured German documents into Polish.
We also learn that Auschwitz was built by the Poles, and served as a cavalry station and a vegetable warehouse before that, when the Germans appropriated and repurposed it. Birkenau, though, was constructed afresh by the Nazis after their occupation of Poland.
Her daugher Eva and the daughter’s music teacher were both sent straight to the gas chambers as aoon as they (and Jan and Sophie) reached Auschwitz.
She never saw Jan. Hoss did not keep his promise to help her meet Jan once and he also did not move him from the camp. He never connected with her to tell how Jan is doing after “the movement”. She feels betrayed.
And then Nathan comes back into her life as if nothing at all has happened.
The explosive revelation that Stingo gets from Nathan’s doctor brother Larry who wants to meet privately jolts us too, not just Stingo. Yes, we kind of suspected some of this, but the reality of Nathan is much more shocking and painful than you could have guessed.
Then an old friend and classmate finds him and invites him to his mansion for a stay. He goes there for a few days – another sexual rejection and frustration there from a young girl – and he is called back by the janitor because “all hell has broken loose again”. Nathan hit Sophie and she ran away. Nathan disappeared too. Stingo resolves to go back.
This time he finds that Nathan had hit Sophie so hard that she thought he had broken her arm. He had not. In his rage, he had accused Sophie of having sex with another man – again. When Sophie tells that Nathan had a gun with him, Stingo grows very alarmed. He decides to call the brother who he learns is in Toronto for a conference. Those days, reaching someone was not so easy but Stingo is determined. And then he wants to go see Nathan to calm him down.
When Nathan calls raving, Stingo realizes that the mystery man Nathan accused of infedility with is him, Stingo!
He says that he has a gun and is very close and is coming to kill them both. Not able to verify, they flee by train to Stingo’s father’s farm down South but Stingo faces problems on the way. Sophi, for one, could not stop chain drinking and she still harbours hope that Nathan will get off his high and take her. Stingo knows differently, thanks to the talk with Nathan’s brother.
The last part of the story comes out when Sophie goes with Nathan in the train. She talks of Wanda, and how the Nazis were planning to start on the Poles after finishing with the Jews. She shows photos of dead children – both starved and frozen – in a box car before they even reached the concentration camps assigned to them. They were the rejects in the screening process to ‘Germanize’ all Poles.
The final ‘choice’ she has to make is heartrending, as is all of the inhumane treatment – the animal-like treatment meted out to all the people in the box car. It comes as a huge shock.
The ending of the story? This is the only possible ending fit for a story like this but it still hurts a little.
If you ask me to rack my brains to find some fault in this almost perfect book, I can find some : For example, it waxes a wee bit too much philosophical at the inevitable end of the story. But otherwise a master plot, and a delight in the style of storytelling. The language is exquisite without being redundant overall.
All through the book, the narration is excellent and the emotions, the background, the escalations, all of them told in a fantastic way.
A great book. The story stays with you for a very long time after you have closed the book.
9/10
— Krishna