The bookclub discussed Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Reading this was a reminder that one reason I go to bookclub is to be encouraged to read books I otherwise wouldn’t, and to get more out of them than I can on my own.
The Picture of Dorian Gray (Wikipedia review) is the story of a beautiful young man who becomes evil and debauched after he views his portrait and realizes how much he wishes to stay looking young and beautiful. His wish is granted; his outer form stays young and vigorous while the painting shows the effects of his lifestyle; he keeps the painting hidden from the world as long as possible. The book played a role in Oscar Wilde’s trial and probably influenced his being convicted.
I had a hard time getting through the book and skimmed many of the more boring passages. While we were discussing the book, it became obvious that part of the reason I didn’t enjoy it as much as the others did was because I got a version without footnotes or an explanatory introduction. Knowing something of the literary allusions makes a big difference. Those boring passages, for example, were supposedly intended to illustrate the tedium of parts of Dorian Gray’s life. Not that anyone at bookclub read them in detail.
The second edition has a lot of changes from the first edition; new characters, passages designed to tone down the homoeroticism, and we had some fun trying to figure out how the Victorian-era audience would have seen the novel, compared to the way it would be understood today. This is where those footnotes (which the others in bookclub had in their editions) came in handy.
It’s probably an important book to have read, given its historical significance; I doubt that I’ll read it again in the near future but if I did, I’d get another, annotated, version.
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A riddle related to Dorian Gray originally expressed at the beginning of Tom Stoppard’s play “Professional Foul”:
What is it that, as the years pass by seems to get ever younger?
Answer in next comment!
Answer:
A photo/portrait of yourself.
When I was at high school, my English teacher couldn’t understand why the whole class kept breaking out in laughter as we were reading one of Shakespeare’s plays. The reason was that he had an old version with no footnotes, we all had a new version with footnotes explaining what his various expressions actually meant. It made a huge difference to our appreciation of it.
Cheers, Tony.
Dear Lauren,
While living in Mexico in the early 70s my only knowledge of rock and roll were the Beetles and Clearance Clearwater Revival. The reason for this was that the only good rock station in town only played those two bands with the idea of voting at the end of every day (for months on end) which was the better band. People would phone in their choice. While teaching at an American high school in Mexico City my students asked me if I had ever heard of Alice Cooper. My answer was telling, “Who’s she?”
In the same way readers in Vancouver and many book clubs tend to choose their books from a select and often narrow list of classics and contemporary writers.
There are two that I would recommend that would not be on either lists. The first one is the Nobel Prize winner from Portugal, José Saramago.
His most accessible book is the superbly translated into English (Giovanni Pontiero) The History of the Siege of Lisbon. It is sort of time travel yet it isn’t. You quickly learn to understand and appreciate the author’s minimum punctuation. This particular novel is a beautiful love story that would appeal to any romantic.
The second author, José Carlos Zomoza is a Cuban born psychiatrist who lives in Spain. His, The Art of Murder would appeal to those who migh enjoy William Gibson with more of a twist. This novel written in 2001 is about a future world in 2006(!) in which nobody hangs picures on the wall anymore. Sculpture is obsolete. What has taken their place? That’s the surprise.
Both of these books show that Latin American and Portuguese writers are pushing the boundary as to what a novel means.
Alex Waterhouse-Hayward
I always mean to join a book club so that I’ll get back into reading again and like you said read and appreciate things that I might otherwise have missed.
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