Sophie's World Reflection #6

Things continually get weirder and weirder (as if that seemed possible to me before reading the most recent chapters). It is getting harder to distinguish between what is real and what is not, while I begin hating Hilde’s father more each moment. I want so badly for Sophie and Alberto to be real, so to think that the major is messing with them the way he appears to be is not my most pleasant thought. It is hard to fathom how they could possibly be real, when they respond to every little thing the major does and are so acutely aware of their situation. It makes no sense but I want it to be true at the same time, I would hate to have invested my time into characters that I assumed had so much freewill, only to find out they had none. However, it appears that they do have some amount of freewill, shown by Alberto’s attempts to investigate the major and what he is doing when his attention is on Sophie (like when the goose came to take her out of the tree she’d gotten stuck in).
Things only got weirder to me when Alberto showed Sophie a physical copy of the book that we are currently reading. It made me wonder how he knew about the book, and how there can be a book when it is still seemingly being written. Things in the book are being discussed that, at this point, have not actually happened. So how is there a version of the book published when this is the case? It grows too confusing to try and answer, but hopefully as we finish the book my question will be answered anyways.