Rating: 
Summary: Beauty and Beast portmanteau...
Review: that would be the ideal way to describe Dorian Gray - an impressionable young Adonis on his Hedonistic quest for a life which itself is a work of art. Society artist Basil Hallward's portrait of Dorian Gray which ages and hardens as Gray's quest lead him to a remorseless and brutal lifestyle is the mirror to his soul while his physical form remains as youthful as ever. The book builds up beautifully towards the climax. Wilde's generates idle irreverent amoral and bitingly sarcastic dialogue as if out of thin air.
Rating: 
Summary: Be careful what you wish for
Review: Gray is a beautiful young man who after seeing his portrait wishes that the painting ages rather than his own face. Initially innocent he is corrupted by Henry Wotton his supposed friend, a devoutly immoral character who leads Dorian Gray into a truly sinful existance.
By chance Gray discovers his wish came true and the portrait not his own face is aged by his lifestyle, but when he sees the extent to which the image has been ravaged he wishes to recinde the wish. Wilde illustrates the ugly side of our natures and shows there is always a price to pay for it despite the public face presented to the world. Despite the dark message, the biting wit and sarcasm keep the reader amused as well as disturbed, leaving me with a somewhat guilty feeling if I should laugh while reading it (which I often did). The interesting thing is the author does not take a moral stance, maybe because of the life he led himself. Although Wild's only novel and not overly long, it is a truly great work. For the wit alone and a lifetimes worth of quotations it is essential reading.
Rating:
Summary: A fine example of Wildean Wit.
Review: The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde is a novel that explores the themes of human corruption, moral decadence and the value of youth in society. The novel follows the life of a narcissistic youth, Dorian Gray, who makes a Faustian pact with the devil to keep his youth. Dorian grows to love immorality and the darker joys of life. However, the evils of his life do not manifest within him but in his portrait.Published in 1890, The Picture of Dorian Gray is still a popular choice of literature for society today, being praised as one of Wilde's greatest works. The appeals of The Picture of Dorian Gray to a modern day society are the plot, characters and Wilde's firm command of language. The novel deals with themes that are common in society, drugs, violence, immorality, social decadence and human corruption. At times, Wilde's writing appears shallow and wooden, lacking any action. However, what is lost in action is gained in dialogue, which is exquisite and strongly reflects Wilde's own nature. The novel is riddled with finely wrought epigrams and witticisms that display the true skill and genius of Wilde as both an author and an orator.
Rating:
Summary: Multi-layered entertainment
Review: I enjoyed this entertaining short novel by Wilde, in which the main character, Dorian Gray, gets what he wished for - eternal youth. Instead, his portrait ages and decays, reflecting the degeneration of Gray's body and soul. This eminently Faustian plot is nothing new, but Wilde made the story interesting for me by the additional aspects he brought to it. Of course, it's got a strong ... theme - this is Wilde after all - albeit by allusion and innuendo. The novel can also be read as a sharp critique of Victorian hypocrisy - for example who would have agreed with Lord Henry Wotton that there was a clear divide between "respectable society" and the "criminal classes"? It could, I suppose, also be viewed as a Gothic horror novel. And, not least, there's huge amounts of pithy epigrams and witticisms in the novel. I savoured these, whilst not agreeing with them all of course. My favourite is from Wotton: "It is perfectly monstrous the way people go about nowadays saying things against one behind one's back that are absolutely and entirely true."
Rating:
Summary: an expose of human sin and folly
Review: Three words: Dark, beautiful, sensitive.
Rating:
Summary: The Picture of Dorian Gray
Review: "The Picture of Dorian Gray"
Dorian Gray is a young Englishman who has it all - incredibly good looks, he is rich and favored by everybody, but bad companions encourage the worst in him. A good friend of his paints his portrait. Dorian Gray sees it and makes a wish not possible - to stay youthful forever. He doesn't grow old but the picture of him does, in the most awful and frightening ways.
Dorian shows his friend who painted the picture how it has changed - his friend reaches for a knife and charges at the picture. Dorian restrains his companion and kills him with the knife. Dorian grows more and more evil as the picture grows from awful to hideous. Dorian tries to repent in the end and stabs the picture and the picture returns to how it was at the start, and the hideousness of it that tells who he has become shows on him at last. He has stabbed at it and at himself, so he dies repenting.
"The Picture of Dorian Gray" was my favorite book over the summer because it was easy to read and easy to get into. I also liked the pictures in the book. I thought the storyline was great and loved the ending.
I think that the one who would really like this book as much as me would be my sister, Breena because I know what she likes and she takes my judgement on books as I take hers. She was the first one that introduced me to "The Catcher in the Rye" because she is four years older than me.
Rating:
Summary: Truthful.
Review: Oscar Wilde's "Picture of Dorian Gray" is an entertaining, short novel, with a very honest moral to it. A friend of Dorian Gray, Basil Hayward, paints a picture of Dorian which the painting's subject falls in love with. Dorian wishes that he could remain as beautiful as the picture and that the picture may take on the effects of human aging in his stead. In Wilde's creative twist, Dorian's wish comes true, although this only becomes evident to him as his life becomes increasingly chaotic. As the novel progresses, Dorian, in obsessive love with himself, fights to keep his sanity as the burden of his stress, sins, and guilt, are transfered to the picture which increasingly haunts him. Wilde's writing is colorful and his characters' emotions realistic. This novel is a cutting, yet accurate, observation of human nature in general, especially in our modern, self-glorifying societies. Wilde makes the perfect critique of our selfishness and vanity when Dorian Gray says: "There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about." For many in our TV and Hollywood crazed world, this statement is not troublesome but rather, a personal mantra.
Rating: 
Summary: Unforunately Superficial
Review: Every so often one has the good fortune of discovering an author whose work reaffirms all that is appreciable in literature by exemplifying its worst. Oscar Wilde, after reading whose novel and two fairy tales, quickly obviates any further need or desire to be further acquainted. The knowledge found on the cover of my paperback edition, between the obligatory sickly hagiography that usually betrays the expectation it inspires, that The Picture of Dorian Gray was apparently the author's only fruitful attempt at a 'full-length' novel, leaves one snickering ante facto in not entirely facetious gratitude. Wilde was seemingly more at home in the realm of fairy tales, and this 217-page full-length novel not by itself finding ground to fill the space between the covers, finds itself supported by three samples of that genre.
One might be forgiven for assuming that the novel portends to explore an emotional or philosophical metaphor of a relationship between the eponymous painting and its subject, but the implied exploration is unfortunately mostly specious. The metaphor, to be sure, is there, but it is a mere seed that never takes root or grows out of its entirely obvious and superficial form, and the story thus fails to fulfil its promise.
Furthermore, the filling leaves one with a bad aftertaste. None of the three characters have any endearing features to redeem themselves for the gall they otherwise freely spew. 'Lord Henry' in particular has no characterizing dimension other than denigration of everything else in the form of dull pseudowitticisms, from which comparison we take it the aristocrat was intended to benefit. We learn his contempt of clergy (bishops "don't think"), stockbrokers ("even a stock-broker can gain a reputation for being civilized"), dowagers (they are "overdressed"), academicians (tedious), the middle class (not modern), Americans, marriage, women, and Jews (I don't believe any mention of the religion ever lacks the adjective "fat"). The misogyny in particular is so pungent and the female characters so weak that the protagonists cannot otherwise but treat them with the contempt that they do. If indeed "women are decorative" it is merely because the men do not have a vision that sees beyond superficialities. This is no parody of aristocratic vanity (in the style of Thackeray, for instance) so one quickly finds oneself wishing for one of these maligned targets of Lord Henry's dull wit to return the favor with a dull but well-deserved kick in the [rump].
When the characters are not railing against the world, they are theorizing about it, but the obvious inconsistencies and utter inanity of the theories make them impossible to consider seriously. To give an example, and not have one character take the brunt of all the book's failings, the artist Basil Hallward states first (speaking of his own work) that "every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not the sitter," but six pages later that "an artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them." A story dealing ostentatiously with a profound relationship between ars and artis, in which the artist doesn't remember from one moment to the next whether or not he put feeling in his art, reveals that its author has lost control of his subject. Othertimes the theories are merely silly and quite impossible to take at face value. What to make, for example, of the idea that "beauty is a form of genius- is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation," or that "people say sometimes that beauty is superficial. That may be so, but at least it is not so superficial as thought is." This is just tripe without considerable meaning.
Within this theorizing there are faint reverberations reaching toward some oblique philosophy of hedonism, but never quite advancing beyond a mere slogan. Without actually doing the work of fully expounding the philosophy, or having the courage to fully sound its implications, in the way that for example de Sade did, the author cannot reasonably expect us to sympathize or find the actions of his characters anything but wholly unsatisfying and their reactions rather balmy.
Wilde quite clearly has no desire (charitably assuming it is not from a lack of potential) to prepare and construct a plot. One of the adjunct characters, Jim, whose sister Sibyl later commits suicide over the protagonist, finds out he is a bastard son, his mother was orphaned, and forgives her (what for, we are left to guess), all within the space of three quarter page. Dorian's swings of attitude toward Sybil from ignorance through love through despisement through sorrow to self-forgiveness are so extreme and irrational that they make a pastiche of emotion. Jim's completely unfounded anger toward Dorian is so unrealistically sudden and out of proportion that it is obvious how Jim's fears will be realized and that there will be a confrontation. There is no mystery, less a sense of a world to discover than of being dragged along by an uninterested parent. The rhetorical questions Dorian asks in his histrionic despair are answered immediately, it is for me simply to get in, sit down, shut up, and hold on.
Even more fundamentally, the characters are shallow, undeveloped, and quite stereotypical, the dialog stilted and unrealistic- altogether a surprisingly unsophisticated style, especially in the light of the beautiful writing of his contemporaries. Dialog has a tendency to spin off into unrelated tangents that are unceremoniously and artificially 'snapped back' to the main thread. Henry's inability to speak in any other form than witless aphorism is at first merely unfunny, then quickly boring, later irritating, and finally not bearing further reading. And this is unfortunately barely the only character development in the story at all, the only other characters having little strength of will of their own to resist mimicking this trite ascerbicism.
If the book has revealed anything at all, it is not a deeper analysis of art or hedonism, but a much more animal homoeroticism. Dorian Gray is much more than anything else a love story with the trimmings (envy and a murder-suicide), and all the less respectful because it dares not speak its name. Female emotions are contemptible, but the same expressions of liking (Wilde can never bring himself to call it more), admiration of beauty, and extreme flattery by men towards other men, are accepted naturally and not subject to this contempt.
Rating:
Summary: An excellent story
Review: What is more important, physical beauty or a beautiful heart? This story gets to the bottom of that question and takes you on a journey ending with a surprise. Dorian Gray is the perfect main character. You will love him, dislike him, loathe him and then pity him. Just as relevant 100 years after it was penned.
Rating:
Summary: I love this book
Review: "The Picture of Dorian Gray" is, in my opinion, one of the best novels ever written. I would highly recommend it.
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