The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde

So many book, so little time. Compared with some I consider myself well-read, compared with the number of books on the market I feel I’m hardly literate. Rarely do I read a book a second time although I’ve got lots which would be worth it. Why have I decided to honour this novel with a second perusal? I read the German translation in my teens and since then Oscar Wilde has always been with me, so to speak. I’ve read his children’s stories, seen on the stage and read with my students The Importance Of Being Earnest, been to a brilliant West End performance of Lady Windermere’s Fan and have seen the film on Oscar Wilde starring ...  Read the complete review

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ "It is the spectator, and not life that art really mirrors". ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ In "The Picture of Dorian Gray" the wonderful fop Oscar Wilde paints a bleak picture of the repellent side of human nature as the beautiful hero Dorian Gray ages not one jot between lewd acts and malefaction. Yet the sinister portrait of him hanging in the attic takes on all the pestilence, age and filth that befits the face of one so lost in hedonism. That portrait is an iconoclastic image of the age: it matters little if you have ever read the book but I would be surprised ...  Read the complete review

It was with a little trepidation that I began to read 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' by Oscar Wilde. You see, I like to think of myself as a pretty intelligent human being and then the likes of Oscar Wilde and Stephen Fry come along and cause me to grin inanely while I pretend to know what they are talking about, when in actual fact my brain is just thinking 'I wonder if I could use chicken instead of lamb in Irish stew.' So I began 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' assuming I would not understand any of it but safe in the knowledge that I could tick it off my 'must-read' list and pretend that I did understand it and it was just too boring and unenjoyable to ...  Read the complete review

Very challenging to begin with, although I can't explain whether this was primarily due to Oscar Wilde's writing style or getting to grip with the gentry from Victorian times. The novel seems to span a period of about 20 years although there were some serious jumps in time as nothing seemed to take that long. It wasn't until Dorian met a character later in the novel and mentioned an incident from 18 years earlier that I realised the time frame. A clever novel whereby we need to think about what we wish for as the grass is not always greener on the other side and we never think about the consequences of our desires. Dorian in facts dreams of what most people ...  Read the complete review

This story first appeared in an American publication called "Lippincott's Monthly Magazine" in 1890. The novel was overwhelmingly condemned by British journals of the time because it failed to show "a single good and holy impulse in human nature" We first meet Dorian as a young man who has agreed to sit for the painter Basil Hallward. Basil is captivated by his beauty and paints him several times before attempting a huge full-length portrait of amazing quality and depth; in fact Basil thinks it's his best work ever. This painting is given to Dorian as a gift and forms the focal point of Dorian's undoing. Basil has taken ...  Read the complete review