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A review by jasonfurman
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
5.0
I am a big Oscar Wilde fan and have read all of his stories and fairy tales and plays multiple times. But I’ve only read The Picture of Dorian Gray once before and that was thirty years ago. Re-reading it was spectacular. I started out listening on Audible (excellent narration by Russell Tovey) but then end up reading most of the book and also listening to about half of it.
It is so witty, the story is a really well constructed dark fairy tale / tragedy, the major characters are fascinating, and Wilde has an almost cinematic gift for a montage like presentation of Dorian Gray’s descent into pleasure and darkness, showing relatively little of it specifically but immersing us in an almost opium-fueled dream version of it.
One question is whether Dorian Gray has a moral. In a way it does—the sinner is punished. But in a way it doesn’t—the person (Lord Henry Wotton) who drew Dorian Gray into sin does not seem to be punished. Moreover the book itself is a celebration of art for art’s sake, beauty and asceticism—which is in tension with its dire warning about the inevitable(?) consequences of this pursuit if unrestrained by any other consideration.
It is so witty, the story is a really well constructed dark fairy tale / tragedy, the major characters are fascinating, and Wilde has an almost cinematic gift for a montage like presentation of Dorian Gray’s descent into pleasure and darkness, showing relatively little of it specifically but immersing us in an almost opium-fueled dream version of it.
One question is whether Dorian Gray has a moral. In a way it does—the sinner is punished. But in a way it doesn’t—the person (Lord Henry Wotton) who drew Dorian Gray into sin does not seem to be punished. Moreover the book itself is a celebration of art for art’s sake, beauty and asceticism—which is in tension with its dire warning about the inevitable(?) consequences of this pursuit if unrestrained by any other consideration.