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A review by tbr_the_unconquered
Complete Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde by Oscar Wilde
5.0
This is a book that I have been waiting to read for a while now for two reasons. The first is the need to read up on fairy tales from across the World. This was one of those interests that was forever doomed to be in the attic of my mind. I would glance at my wish list and keep the fairy tales aside for just one more time. So finally I mustered up enough resolve and got this book to read. The second reason was that I hadn’t read anything by Oscar Wilde yet and thought of starting from here. It certainly was a good start. This book combines nine stories from two separate volumes : The Happy Prince and The House Of Pomegranates which to sum up are all pretty bleak and depressing. Maybe this was a problem with my expectation of the word fairy tale for I anticipated conclusions which are better and finer for the key characters. Wilde however shows a different world view altogether. He does have the key ingredients of fables in his stories : magic, animals who talk, gods and demons but the situations and occurrences in his stories are closer to real life than fantasy. The good does not always succeed, nice people get cut down fastest and selfishness almost always wins the day. This is not to say that the stories are not enjoyable, they are little gems of the writing craft and quite beautiful in terms of the language.
Oscar Wilde is rather unmatched in his description of beauty. Descriptions of nature and of human beings are stunningly evocative and made me yearn for more of it. There is this story of ‘The nightingale and the rose’ which talks about the ultimate futility of sacrifice and the irony of being in love, where at the start of the tale itself you sense that things won’t go right for the poor nightingale making the ultimate sacrifice. The sense of irony in these stories are as sharp as knives. A prime example for this is ‘The Star Child’ where almost everything seems to be going well when in the last one sentence, Wilde turns the whole story on it is head. The story of the happy prince is heartbreakingly beautiful and so is the one of the selfish giant. They filled me with awe and the all-encompassing power of having a gentleness to one’s behavior to fellow beings. The descriptions of lands from far away as told in ‘The fisherman and his soul’ are perhaps the finest descriptions of cultures and people of lands that never will be in existence.
To say that Oscar Wilde is brilliant is laughingly absurd and yet this is a must read for anyone who ever wants to know what a really brilliant fairy tale feels like.
Oscar Wilde is rather unmatched in his description of beauty. Descriptions of nature and of human beings are stunningly evocative and made me yearn for more of it. There is this story of ‘The nightingale and the rose’ which talks about the ultimate futility of sacrifice and the irony of being in love, where at the start of the tale itself you sense that things won’t go right for the poor nightingale making the ultimate sacrifice. The sense of irony in these stories are as sharp as knives. A prime example for this is ‘The Star Child’ where almost everything seems to be going well when in the last one sentence, Wilde turns the whole story on it is head. The story of the happy prince is heartbreakingly beautiful and so is the one of the selfish giant. They filled me with awe and the all-encompassing power of having a gentleness to one’s behavior to fellow beings. The descriptions of lands from far away as told in ‘The fisherman and his soul’ are perhaps the finest descriptions of cultures and people of lands that never will be in existence.
To say that Oscar Wilde is brilliant is laughingly absurd and yet this is a must read for anyone who ever wants to know what a really brilliant fairy tale feels like.