Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.
A picture that wilts and ages instead of the man whom was painted. A wonderful basic for an interesting story, one can assume. I owned my copy of The Picture of Dorian Gray for quite some time now – considering I actually bought it because of the beautiful cover – but I never got myself into reading it. This month is was picked for me from another member of Goodreads and I simply loved the challenge that came with it. The older english language of this classic wasn’t easy for me as a not native speaker.
I had some problems with Wilde’s long sentences – the first i stumbled over was half a page long and almost killed me because I had to read it several times to understand it. I also discovered that classics might not be my kind of books. The used language is simply too old for me. Another problem was the following – I do have a kind of pet peeve with authors that use a word slightly too often. Oscar Wilde seemed to love the word “cried”. I cannot explain how many times I’ve read the word in while wanting to throw the book against a wall. But after quite some time of fretting about this fact I accepted it and tried to read over it.
The plot of the novel was really slow in my opinion. It took a lot of pages until the action started and the puzzle pieces came together. From the beginning it was not fast-paced enough, the story lingering on the wrong places too long. I wished for more to happen and only got this when there were roughly 80 pages left. While I thought about quitting the book on earlier moments, I extremely enjoyed the last chapters even though I couldn’t connect to the characters enough. I felt more like an observer than being a part of the story – and this actually hurts me. I wanted to love the book since the story was such a promising one. I also would die to see a more modern story based on this one – I can imagine that this could be really good.
But as said before I throughly liked the latter part of the book so it still got a quite good rating from me. On the contrary I’m sure that classics aren’t my genre and that I don’t want to pick up another one for some time.
The rating:
