The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde

Bookshops have a strange magnetism to them. I have been a happy customer of flipkart.com for quite a few years now. But it has been mostly due to the ease of discovery and availability of desired books. But make me walk past a bookshop stocked with volumes and my steps divert in the direction of the establishment. It is the same exhilarating sense that led me to a local shop advertising a sale on its gate. I browsed through a lot of books with a certain restraint. The constant awareness of a humongous and increasing pile of books lying on my shelves was dogging me. My eyes fell on a book that displayed the name of 'Oscar Wilde' in big fonts. I picked up the book. "The Picture of Dorian Gray" had an interesting teaser. A story that I remembered having heard. But I could not remember where and I certainly could not remember Oscar Wilde being the author. So I picked it up and brought it home and dumped it with the rest of the books in my shelf. I picked it up at long last to accompany me in my Uttarakhand travel. I intended to finish it over two weeks. I was done in half the time.

Oscar Wilde is a well known name. I think I had first heard of him back in school when I used to read. Or perhaps in college when I had resumed my affair with literature. I had, for some reason, thought of him as a poet. But a man of literature is rarely bound to a single form. "The Picture of Dorian Gray" is Wilde's only novel. He has written several plays and essays which combine into an interesting bibliography. He is an expert raconteur and the story is extremely witty. Every page of the book contains witticism that makes you smile inwards at its frank realism. You agree with Lord Wotton's view of the existing world and his idea of a new hedonism. You agree with Dorian Gray's loss of morale and his repentance. You agree with everything that Oscar Wilde puts on those pages.

The story is about a certain beautiful young man who, in his age of innocence, befriends a perverted gentleman - Lord Henry Wotton, while sitting for a portrait by an artist friend. This portrait and Lord Wotton's enchanting words produce in the youth a revelation of his own beauty. He cries at the injustice of the portrait retaining all the beauty while he bearing the brunt of age and character. He wishes that things be otherwise. As he grows corrupt under his new friend's influence, he discovers that his wish has miraculously been granted. He hides the portrait and goes about committing one misdeed after another owing to the shield of his undying youth and beauty while the portrait changes to reflect his soul.

Oscar Wilde has pleasantly surprised me. I was expecting the work to be drier for some reason but it was certainly not. My interest piqued, I have been looking at the list of Wilde's works. Perhaps I will order another in near future.