This is another of those books I’ve been meaning to read for ages and kept putting off. Although I’ve a particularly good reason for putting this one off, as a very good friend of mine, who died a couple of years ago, spoke to me about this book and I was worried that might make it hard to read for quite other reasons.

He said that when he read this book as a young man it made him certain that he was not homosexual. Now, that in itself was enough to make me curious about the book. This is a book that could only have been written by a homosexual male and it is a book about homosexuality in very many ways. The obsession with youth and beauty is almost a cliché of homosexual obsessions – though the ‘dandy’, the vanity of men, is much more common now, I think. We are increasingly a culture obsessed with appearance. I wonder if reading the book and seeing this obsession was the thing that convinced my friend he was not homosexual, if that was the thing that made him say, ‘no, that’s not me’. Or rather if it was the expression of desire very early in the book for Dorian Gray by Basil, his painter and ardent admirer, that convinced him.

Lord Harry is one of those talking desk calendars, in fact, other than Hamlet, I think it would be hard to find a book with more quotable quotes per page. Some of them are deliciously funny and others are just the sort of illumination that a match struck in a dark room makes.

There were moments in this book, as there are in other works by Wilde, when one gets a feeling of premonition of his fate – it is hard to think of a sadder story than that of the last years of his life, or one that makes more plain how incredibly stupid are societies that punish people for their sexuality. There would be very little I could not forgive Wilde for, particularly after he wrote The Importance of Being Earnest – this book, his only novel, is nearly as good.

Our sins are not quite displayed as clearly on our faces as is assumed here, but our lives do mark us – it is a pity that in our obsession with youth that we forget how beautiful our scars can be and that love, real love, the love that touches us most deeply, is when another accepts our scars and loves us for them, rather than in spite of them.

One of the most quotable quotes in this book is an attack on realism in fiction – “That is the reason I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who could call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one. It is the only thing he is fit for.” I understand this is hardly a ‘realistic’ story – I mean, it is really a myth and takes liberties with ‘reality’ so as to comment on the world through the form of a myth – but like all such stories centred on something that is clearly ‘over-the-top’ it is contained in a shell that struck me as remarkably realistic. There was no time when I felt Wilde was calling a spade an implement for cultivation or some such silly phrase. His writing is always clear and to the point. The most ‘flowery’ language is perhaps when he is describing the perfumes Gray becomes fascinated in and seeks to understand ‘what there was in frankincense that made one mystical, and in ambergris that stirred one’s passions’, but even this is hardly as romantic or less real than TS Eliot’s (that most ‘modern’ of writers) “In vails of ivory and coloured glass / Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes,” Even at his most flowery, Wilde is hardly ‘unrealistic’.

I came to this book expecting it to be much ‘sillier’ than it turned out to be. I’ve no idea why I thought this – perhaps because I knew that the central idea of the book was that a man has an odd relationship with a painting in that he stays young while the painting gets old. But the book wasn’t nearly as silly as I thought it would be. I really did enjoy it.

*gay drama*

Last year, I challenged myself to read one classic a month...

...And it pretty much took me all of last year to finish just this book...and Peter Pan - AKA the two shortest classics I have in my library. So there's that...



Now lesser mortals might be embarrassed by this; but, thankfully, I am completely and utterly secure in the magnificence of my mediocrity...and so I shall merely endeavor another try.

I'm sure the classic I select for 2020 (see how I've adjusted my standards and accepted that it might take ALL year to finish one book? #winning) will be epic and tedious AF scintillating on every level.

But I digress.

Even though it took the better part of a year to finish this thing, I did truly enjoy it. Wilde's witty repartee and commentary in regards to human nature was very thought provoking - and still very relevant today. More than ever, society is obsessed with youth and beauty and so much unnecessary bullshit, it's insane.

I think I might actually re-read this sometime this year. Even if it does take 10 months...

One star because I loathed Dorian Gray and Henry what's-his-name. Morally-shady/immoral characters have never appealed to me, and whenever I encounter them they end up ruining the entire experience (a notable exception was Wuthering Heights).

Sibyl Vane's narrative was boring and I do agree that she was shallow and quite idiotic...There was an entire chapter dedicated to describing Dorian's experimentation with jewelry and embroidery which was so completely mind-numbing I skipped it altogether. And by the last quarter or so I'd stopped reading and just skimmed the rest. I bet I would've enjoyed this more if I'd simply read the "notes on text" and saved myself a whole lot of n  ennuin (a word Henry likes to use and which, unbeknownst to him, applies splendidly to almost everything he says).

In addition, I do not understand the author's insistence that The Picture of Dorian Gray, or any work of art for that matter, ought to be assessed based on its artistic/aesthetic value and not on whether it carries a moral message, because I love it when the book I'm reading is trying to convey something...I actually feel that this book contains a moralistic idea: that one should never fully indulge one's whims and passions without considering their consequences, and that physical beauty means very little when you are an abhorrent human being on the inside.

I would also condemn a work of art if I found it preaches, encourages, praises, or otherwise tries to present in a positive light, an action or an idea that I consider to be immoral. Obviously homosexuality does not belong in this category if that is what Wilde was trying to get around.

Lastly, the ending was utterly unsatisfactory; I'd hoped that Dorian would be publicly hanged. This death was too merciful for his shallow, selfish, loathsome, and ugly self. Henry, the pretentious shit, should have gotten something too.

Nie jestem fanką tego tłumaczenia. Czuję się jakby czegoś brakowało.
I ocena 2019- 5/5
II ocena 2021- 4/5

n   "A strange sense of loss came over him. He felt that Dorian Gray would never again be to him all he had been in the past." n
—Basil Hallward

Some books we read, and some we crawl inside to walk among the characters. I feel I have spent considerable time in the company of Basil Hallward, his best friend, Lord Henry Wooton, and the supreme muse, Dorian Gray.

“I really can’t exhibit it. I have put too much of myself into it.” When Basil, the artist, sputters this confession to Lord Henry, it was the understatement of the century because the likeness created in this painting, his all-consuming passion, stirred up a magic none could have predicted. Take two scoops of a painter’s soul and slowly fold in the corruption of a shallow, vain young man, add a splash of evil influence from the best friend, and you will see a life go up in flames in the most horrifying, magnificent way possible.

The descriptive imagery in The Portrait of Dorian Gray is glorious. This tale so grabbed me that I took to harassing my Kindle on several occasions, trying to warn off the players within. The story does show the darkest parts of human nature: narcissism, depravity and greed, without any thought of who might be harmed in the pursuit of pleasure and treasure; but, within its pages, there lies a great deal of love and humor, culminating in a five-star explosion of an ending.

If you haven’t read this masterpiece, please don’t wait another day! I can't praise this creation by Oscar Wilde enough.

Who would’ve guessed that classics were classics cause they were good? Mind blowing

I finally get around to reading this and find out it’s really good! Figures

4.25