A review by bartlebybleaney
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

5.0

What an unusual book. It wasn't at all the sort of thing I'd expected based on what I'd heard about it. It seemed, at first, as thought Wilde had attempted to write a novel by pasting together all of his best witticisms and one long speech after another. After a while, the book almost seemed to be morphing into a Dickens novel. Eventually, Wilde gives us a marvelous chapter that consists almost entirely of pageants in a Spenserian or Chaucerian mode--something I haven't come across in any other novel, though I suppose Joyce tried to that sort of thing in Ulysses.

I tore through this. It was that very rare species of book that is both a pleasure to read with regard to the language *and* that I couldn't wait to discover the climax.