Anyway

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.