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5.0 out of 5 stars
Oscar Wilde's genius is in full flower in this eclectic collection of ghost stories, fairy tales and crime stories with a twist, September 30, 2009
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) is best known for such dramatic plays as "Salome": "Lady Windemere's Fan" and his masterpiece "The Importance of Being Earnest." In this new Penguin collection, though, the spotlight is on his considerable abilities as a short story author of genius and wit.
The selections are taken from three short story collections produced by Wilde.
The Happy Prince and Other Tales from 1888:
The Happy Prince is a statue who along with a swallow teaches children the importance of kindness. The statue and the bird are good samaritans who are not understood by the cynical world around them.
The Nightingale and the Rose is a sad story of a nightingale who dies so that a young lover might have a red rose to present to his lady love. She rejects the suitor for a rich man.
The Selfish Giant deals with a greedy giant who is won over by the laughter of children. One of the children is the Christ.
The Devoted Friend tells of a young loving boy and a callous and insensitive miller friend who only wants to be served and not share with others.
The Remarkable Rocket deals with the hubris of a rocket who wants to be the star of the show only to come a cropper.
The Portrait of Mr. W.H. is a literary exploration as to the identity of the man Shakespeare dedicated the sonnets to in the sixteenth century.
In these fairy tales we see Wilde's satire of late Victorian life.
A House of Pomengranates from 1891
The Young King shows how a prince becomes aware of suffering in society.
The Birthday of the Infanta reveals the cruelty inflicted on a dwarf.
The Fisherman and His Soul is a clever tale of the dichotomy between the needs of the body and the soul.
The Star Child deals with the education of a child who fell from the stars. He learns the importance of kindness to animals and human beings in need.
Lord Arthur Saville's Crime and Other Stories from 1891
Lord Arthur Saville is told by a palm reader that he is fated to murder someone. This is an intriguing story which also contains many humorous and witty parts.
The Sphinx Without a Secret is a short story about a woman who invents a past to become more intriguing.
The Canterville Ghost is the best story in the collection. It deals with an American family who live in an old English mansion inhabited by an Elizabethan ghost who murdered his wife and was starved to death by the victim's siblings.
The Model Millionaire is an O Henry type tale in which a kind man is rewarded for a good deed.
Peoms in Prose in 1894 are one page reflections on a variety of topics from the Last Judgement to ruminations on an Elder Tree.
Oscar Wilde's kindness and love of humanity shine in this incandescent stories from fin de siecle London. They will entertain and instruct.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Timeless and priceless!, September 5, 2011
Oscar Wilde
Complete Short Fiction
Penguin Classics, Paperback, 2003.
8vo. xxxvi+280 pp. Edited with an Introduction [x-xxxi] and Notes [pp. 259-280] by Ian Small.
First published thus, 1994.
Reprinted with minor revisions, 2003.
Contents
Chronology
Introduction
Further Reading
A Note on the Texts
The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888)
The Happy Prince
The Nightingale and the Rose
The Selfish Giant
The Devoted Friend
The Remarkable Rocket
The Portrait of Mr. W. H. (1889)
A House of Pomegranates (1891)
The Young King
The Birthday of the Infanta
The Fisherman and his Soul
The Star-Child
Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories (1891)
Lord Arthur Savile's Crime
The Sphinx Without a Secret
The Canterville Ghost
The Model Millionaire
Poems in Prose (1894)
The Artist
The Doer of Good
The Disciple
The Master
The House of Judgment
The Teacher of Wisdom
Appendix
'Elder-tree' (fragment)
Notes
=============================================
Oscar Wilde's fairy tales were my introduction to his writing. At that time, many years ago and in translation, I thought them some of the most beautiful works of fiction I had ever had the happiness of reading. I was so carried away then, and had retained so precious memories, that I was a little afraid of reading them again, a good many years later and in original language. I was afraid the experience this time wouldn't live to my past exaltation. I really needn't have worried. For Wilde's fairy tales still make as powerful and stirring a read as ever before. If anything, the older one reads them, the better they become.
The Penguin Classics edition titled Complete Short Fiction contains a great variety of pieces but certainly among the highlights are the two volumes of fairy tales:The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888) and A House of Pomegranates (1891). I know of no other fiction that can make me laugh and cry so many times in so short a space. Wilde's imagination is indeed wild. It is immensely affecting too. His style is as close to perfection as it is possible in so imperfect a world. It is fabulously readable, yet so rich in compelling allusions that it has to be read slowly in order to savour it.
I daresay Oscar Wilde's so called fairy tales may be read by or to children, but they really should be read by adults. There are in them talking swallows and nightingales, ducks and frogs, statues and giants, fireworks and elements, so these stories certainly are ''fairy''. But there are in them social, political, aesthetic and, above all and most importantly, purely human aspects that no child can possibly grasp. And no adult of average intelligence and certain humanity should neglect. So The Happy Prince is a powerful exploration of exploitation, inequality, misery and unhappiness, but also of somewhat foreign to human nature goodness, unselfish love and compassion; The Nightingale and the Rose is a heart-rending story about the futility, selfishness and transitory nature of love, yet it also suggests that world devoid of love isn't worth the life on it; The Selfish Giant is a touching and incredibly visionary allegory of fatherly affection; The Devoted Friend is a penetrating character sketch of the supremely self-absorbed ''friends'' that everybody must have encountered - or been - from time to time; The Remarkable Rocket is a truly remarkable portrait of another common type of human beings: the highbrow intellectuals, monstrously vain, supercilious, dogmatic, intolerant and cruel, looking down on everything and everybody except themselves and their own interests - until they end in the gutter. No, these tales must not be read by children; fairy and removed from reality as they are, dramatized for the purposes of fiction, they really do remain frightfully real and relevant. And frightfully modern.
It is fascinating to observe the astonishing development of Oscar Wilde in those three years between his two collections of fairy tales. A House of Pomegranates (1891) contains four stories, but they occupy about twice more space than the five in The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888). However, the later tales certainly lack the charm and simplicity of the early ones; I venture to suggest that, on the whole, they lack their profoundness as well. The plots are much more complicated and the style is a great deal more elaborated and embroidered. Sometimes, indeed, the descriptions of surroundings are so excessive as to become even slightly tedious, if for a few lines only; also, nowadays is a little difficult to appreciate Wilde's passion for flowers and especially for precious stones. Finally, the stories in this second volume suffer also from heavy use of archaisms: ''thou art'', ''thee'', ''wilt'', etc. Having said that, though I am probably one of the last people who would appreciate so flowery and florid a style, not to mention an archaic one, Oscar Wilde is definitely among the exceptions. Even when he goes way overboard on passionate rhetoric, he remains singularly lucid and at all events deeply moving. I doubt there are many writers - so far as I am concerned - who can describe such fantastic visions so vividly and with such evocative power that they almost literally materialise in front of my eyes.
Most important of all, what remains the same in A House of Pomegranates is that these tales, too, are among the saddest and most shattering I have ever read. Perhaps they are slightly more appropriate for children than the early ones, but they sure contain lots more than daring flights of imagination and exuberantly lush descriptions; besides, there are few scenes of graphic violence not really suitable for children. The indisputable masterpiece in the group is The Fisherman and his Soul. It's an amazing tale that may well provide you with material for endlessly varied speculations on some ''popular'' conundrums: spiritual and sensual; good and evil; love and lust; sacred and profane; things like that. None of the other tales, long digressions and all, fails to make one think about some of these things either. And who can forget the last lines of The Birthday of the Infanta?
And the Infanta frowned, and her dainty rose-leaf lips curled in pretty disdain. 'For the future let those who come to play with me have no hearts,' she cried, and she ran out into the garden.
On a more mundane level, two things that I wouldn't expect in Oscar Wilde make his fairy tales in general even more fascinating (and his other stories too, for that matter): quite a few arrows shot straight through the heart of Beauty and a strong religious flavour, including few clear references to Jesus Christ. Now Oscar Wilde always had a very subtle sense of humour, or sense of ridiculous to put it more accurately, and it's not always easy for one to tell what are the author's real feelings behind his characters. Not that it much matters, but it's an interesting game to play. Did Oscar take religion seriously? God, Jesus Christ, the soul and all that kind of incredible Christian stuff? Did he take beauty really so seriously as his popular image as the proverbial aesthete suggests? These questions will remain open for now.
Although the fairy tales are among the highlights of the volume, the Complete Short Fiction of Oscar Wilde has a lot more to offer. Perhaps the chief thing to appreciate in such collected edition is the great diversity of genres Wilde experimented with. Three things remain constant throughout: the brilliant style, the vivid imagery and the great insight into human nature.
The Portrait of Mr. W. H. (1889) is by far the strangest piece of all. It is something in the middle between fiction, literary criticism and history of English poetry; the editor is quite right to call it ''anomalous text''. Broadly speaking, it is a short story, and with a very neat twist in the end which I at least didn't expect at all, but just about one fourth of it, perhaps, is occupied by excerpts from Shakespeare's sonnets, for the plot revolves around the mystery to whom they were dedicated. In his exhaustive notes, Mr Small has traced every mistake of quotation or any theory that was ever brought to explain who the mysterious fellow was. As it seems Wilde used lots of hypotheses that had been proposed by many a scholar of XIX century England, but the enigmatic, young and beautiful Will Hews seems to have been his original creation. Given that I am totally ignorant of Shakespeare, the story makes surprisingly absorbing read. And Oscar Wilde usually could do really fine things with portraits anyway.
Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories (1891) is a very curious mixture of tales, two short and two long ones, ranging from crime and mystery to ghost story and social comedy; all of them are slightly more real than the fairy tales but just as powerful and relevant to reality - our own included. As obvious from the name, Lord Arthur Savile's Crime is a crime story - but it is much more than that. First of all, it is stupendously entertaining social satire, closely related to Wilde's famous social comedies (and one of the characters is indeed Lady Windermere herself), but it is ''a study in duty'', too, as the telling subtitle tells us. It is amusing and engrossing, yet chilling and disturbing; as pointed by Mr Small in his introduction it reverses completely the traditional Victorian morality; I, for one, can hardly imagine how outraged the impeccable sensibility of those times must have been. Pretty much the same is true for The Canterville Ghost which easily ranks as one of the...
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