Sophie Problems

I'm struggling to finish Sophie's Choice, not because I hate the book, but because I have major problems with the way he decided to tell the story he did. The plot is told from the self-obsessed and extremely verbose young southern struggling writer, Stingo, as he essentially wallows in self-pity
in Brooklyn until meeting a brilliant but tempermental Jewish scientist named Nathan and his beautiful and almost masochistically doting girlfriend, Sophie, a Polish Holocaust survivor. The main meat of the story is Stingo recounting what Sophie told him about her experiences in the Holocaust, struggling to survive, to protect her children, her learning to overcome inborn anti-Semitism ingrained by her father, her struggle to reconcile herself with her break with him (her guilt at having accepted horrible views, her resentment of him for teaching them to her, and her guilt for hating her father, and so on). While this is the interesting part of the story, we have to wade through reams and reams of Stingo whining about his lack of success in love, career and life in general. And when we do get Sophie's backstory, it's all exposition from Stingo's perspective.

"If the foregoing paragraphs with their accumulation of statistics seems, then, to have an abstract or static quality, it is for the reason that I have had to try to re-create, these many years afterward, a larger background to the events in which Sophie were the helpless participants, using data which could scarcely have been available to anyone except the professionally concerned in that long-ago year just following the war's end." (p. 411)

I would have said 'blood-less', or 'dry' rather than 'abstract' or 'static'. The point of the novel seems to be, from very early on, that everyone excused themselves of having any responsibility, and the true horror is that people allowed what they knew to be or should have known was awful, happen anyway, and that Stingo and Sophie were guilty of the same thing: overlooking their own white privilege, wiping themselves of any social responsibility. But it still seems like the most boring, least visceral, least engrossing way to tell a story that must have been, to Sophie and people like her, shattering.