Complicity

Current book: Sophie's Choice
Pages read: 169 - 253

An actual post on a Friday! I told you it was a page-turner.

Predictably, Stingo's girl does not, in fact, provide him with sexual release; instead, she just teases him mercilessly all night and then breaks down in tears, saying that she's a virgin and her analyst is trying to help her work through her sexual repression. Anyway, suffice it to say that Stingo is still pretty sexually frustrated.

He and Sophie and Nathan continue to be friends, and most of the time, all is well. One night, however, after Sophie meets Stingo and tells him that Nathan made a great breakthrough in his research that day (he's a biochemist of some kind), Nathan totally loses his shit again and freaks out at both of them. In the end, Sophie and Nathan have a huge fight and both of them pack their things and leave the boardinghouse, going in opposite directions.

In the meantime, we're getting more of a picture of what happened to Sophie at Auschwitz. It seems she was the favorite secretary/slave of Höss, and, as such, was provided with special treatment. She ended up resolving to seduce him, either mentally or physically, in order to get out of the camp. That's as much as we know, really. There's some detail involved about the workings of the camp and stuff, but I won't bother summarizing it; I assume you know about the Holocaust.

I don't have much analysis to offer today, so I won't. But I am interested to see where things go.