The Picture of Dorian Gray and Three Stories

Oh my goodness, the ending!!

I started The Picture of Dorian Gray over a year ago. After nearly 100 pages I grew bored and shelved it. Since then it has been taunting me on Goodreads. How could a book so small be so hard to read? Was it bad? No, but like most classics you just need to be in the right mood to read it. The language is usually older, thus taking more concentration to read.

This past week I switched to an audiobook version. I'm glad I did. It was much easier to understand. Instead of tripping up over word pronunciations, I let the author's narration guide me through the unknown words. I actually really enjoyed this narration and found the voice to fit the character of Dorian. Slightly hoity, yet elegant. Bravo to the narrator for doing such an excellent portrayal.

Overall I enjoyed the story. It is at times slow, but carries a deeper message. Looks are one thing, but one's actions carry a deeper weight. I'm glad I finally finished it.

I really didn't know what to expect coming into this work. Pretty impressed by Wilde's artful prose and eloquent style. I became enthralled by Dorian Gray's utter spiral into madness and vanity and a mysterious painting. I did think Henry Wotton's tirades were a bit hard to follow and understand but other than that, I really liked this book.

MUST READ BOOK. If you have patience. It has long sentences.

The grey area between right and wrong has certainly been the subject of hundreds of books. Stories of starving thieves, retaliation, and retribution could all be justified in one way or another. The unpleasant side of the right-wrong dichotomy is where this book parks itself, and it moves in the direction of total and utter degeneration of everything, mental, physical, and spiritual.

Dorian Gray is blessed with wealth, class and good genes. Basil Hallward an artist and a good friend, finds in him a muse, and helps him create his best work of art of all time. Dorian is dumbstruck by his own portrait and makes a peculiar wish.
“How sad it is! I should grow old and horrible and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young. It will never be older than this particular day of June. If it were only the other way, If it were I who was to be always young and the picture that was to grow old! For that I would give everything! Yes, there is nothing in the whole world I would not give! I would give my soul for that!”

In the above quote he wishes for an eternal life of untarnished youth in exchange for his soul. Would you take this deal?
If you see it appropriate to consider a human being as a sum of senses and soul, losing his soul, leaves a man, whose only goal in life is to please his senses to the maximum. Actions are driven by senses. Consequences of actions are borne by the soul. Guilt and empathy are functions of the soul. With his new super power, Dorian is driven by his senses alone, in constant search of beauty above all else. Morality and guilt become mere impediments. If you haven't read the book, this would give you an idea of someone who is wasting away their life, drinking and smoking and sleeping around.
But that's not who Dorian is. Dorian is enlightened, like Buddha, only in the wrong direction.

“ He sought to elaborate some new scheme of life that would have its reasoned philosophy and its ordered principles, and find in the spiritualizing of senses its highest realization.”
It's like a uno reverse on the Bhagavad Gita.

This is my favorite quote from the book.
“The worship of the senses has often and with much justice been decried, men feeling a natural instinct of terror about passions and sensations that seem stronger than themselves, and that they are conscious of sharing with the less highly organised forms of existences. But it appeared to Dorian Gray that the true nature of the senses had never been understood and that they had remained savage and animal merely because the world had sought to starve them into submission or to kill them by pain, instead of aiming at making them elements of a new spirituality of which a fine instinct of beauty was to be a dominant characteristic”
This is the statement he puts forward. It is enticing; for a moment I'm confused as to whether I agree to his philosophy or not. Dorian's words can confuse your moral compass. He is capable of this because, he has no restraints of a soul, and thus is capable of ignoring consequences. And beauty, though ephemeral, is enticing to everyone.

“There had been mad wilful rejections, monstrous forms of self torture and self denial, whose origin was fear and whose result was a degradation infinitely more terrible than that fancied degradation from which, in their ignorance, they had sought to escape.......There was to be as Lord Henry had prophesies a new Hedonism”

Dorian lived with no checks. “There were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realize his conception of the beautiful” His knowledge of all things beautiful, is incredible. There is whole, very long, boring chapter dedicated to that; as a statement of his knowledge.

People loved Dorian; his beauty and manners. People looked up to him with awe and admiration, but looked back on him with hatred and disgust. The sensation destination train chugs on till something happens. For once Dorian deviates from his pursuit of beauty, when a need arises to cover up the origin of his new life. What if that hadn't happened? Would his hedonistic life have given him everything he wanted till the end of his life? Or was that an inevitable consequence of his deal with the portrait?
The last few chapters are better than many psychological thrillers. A point reaches where his own mind and the people around him turns against him. His past and acts of evil catches up with him when he's weak.

I would not call this a descent into degradation. I have too much respect for him, for that. He failed at life with class. I wouldn't go within a mile of him in real life, lest I be tempted. I would look at him from afar. He is a work of art.

4.8
I think this is now my favourite classic. Oscar Wilde's writing is so beautiful, and I like how the writing gradually gets darker and darker as the story progresses.
My edition also contained three shorter stories:
The Happy Prince ⭐️⭐️⭐️
The Birthday of the Infanta ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Lord Arthur Savile's Crime ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

I didn't really know anything about the plot when I started the book, and I'm glad I didn't.
I didn't even know it was a horror novel; all I knew was there was a portrait, and I had a vague sense there was a macabre feel to the story.

I highly enjoyed the book whilst despising the characters (in the best possible way), would recommend to anyone who likes stories about uppity victorian era English aristocrats, and those who don't mind disliking the main characters.

This is my first time reading this since high school and it's definitely more misogynist and anti-Semitic than I recall...
But, you know, still funny and insightful. Would watch Dorian Gray's reality television show.

BRAVO Oscar Wilde for writing something pre-1900's that succeeds in keeping me interested throughout the entire time. The Picture of Dorian Gray, a gothic horror novel captures the themes of youth, corruption and identity in new ways that I've never really seen before. Basil Hallward is an artist whose “obsession” has been Dorian Gray, a beautiful young man and believes that he inspires a new form of art. Once a man whose sweet personality infatuated anyone who spoke to him, was altered once Gray met Hallward's friend Lord Henry Wotton, whose hedoism about how beauty and the senses are the only thing worth fulfulling in life is instilled in Gray's mind.

Realizing that he will lose his beauty once he ages, Gray sells his soul in order to maintain you, while his portrait would age and wither based on the debauchery and the sins that he commits in life. Estranging himself with the lords and the high profile Britons who were once good friends, Dorian begins to reflect on his life and murders Basil Hallward because he blames him for his unsettled fate.

At the end of the long tireless twisted life, Dorian tried different ways to turn his life around and start off with a clean new slate. Without succeeding, Dorian becomes fed up with the life he lives and studies his portrait, which has become wrinkled and sinful, reflecting the turbulent double life that he led. After 18 years of not aging, Dorian stabs the painting, without noticing that he would end up committing suicide. His body becomes frail and destroyed, unrecognizable to all and then his picture is restored to the beauty that Basil Hallward captivated.

The novel was craftly written and Wilde displayed the turbulent lives that people get tied up in when faced with questions of importance, the philosophy of life, and trying to defeat what the “spiritual” force has had destined for them. With other undertoning themes such as homosexuality, Wilde was definitely strong to write such a book during an era where such taboo was forbidden, but surely cannot be regretful of a novel that definitely makes the mind more stimulated.

Nat (the guide) did a wonderful job creating this audiobook. 

The narrator is the perfect choice for this audiobook. He brought the story to life and did it justice. 

The first time I have heard of this was the 2013 movie edition and I loved it so much. It was poetically beautiful and I loved how it was written. It did feel slow at times but the ending made up for it.