We may meet one of the most cited authors in the world. The spirit of a Oscar Wilde irreverent but hedonistic, homosexual when sodomy was a crime, disease and deviation, and always an emotional and exciting author. Narrator and playwright like few others.
A writer whose life and work so indissoluble in the composition of his imagination, but also of his claiming aspect, has thus reached our days as the most paraffinized of universal literature. Not that it seems bad to me, the legends are like that, but reading Oscar Wilde is much more than looking for one of his quotes with which to show an intellectual harvest.
Oscar Wilde feels and imagines, Wilde created a very unique world between the underworlds of cities, vices and appearances. If your contemporary, compatriot and even love rival Bram Stoker he was in charge of configuring blood in the general imagination as a mixture of terror and eroticism with his Dracula, he was in charge of reaching even deeper shadows within the human soul with his wonderful Dorian Gray.
In addition, Wilde also took advantage of fiction and the comfortable adaptation of the satirical to the theater to give a good shake to the imposed morality, to the social canons so marked particularly in his space and time ...
3 recommended books by Oscar Wilde
The Portrait of Dorian Gray
In a way it annoyed me to quote him in the first place, because of that of the movie and others, but it would be unfair not to exalt this novel that accompanied me for a few nights of an immensely pleasant reading.
At times my room acquired the image of a dark nineteenth-century room, loaded with ornamentation between which doubts and shadows were hidden, and unleashed souls ... Dorian Gray continues to be, more than a hundred years after the death of its author, a cornerstone in the debates between ethics and aesthetics, in the relationships that maintain good and evil, soul and body, art and life.
Presided over by the law of fatality, Dorian Gray continues to achieve the objective that Wilde himself wanted for his book: «Poisonous if you want, but you will not be able to deny that it is also perfect, and perfection is the goal to which we aim we artists ».
The importance of being called Ernesto
Dramaturgy is very close to scripts of entanglements. And if these scripts can be skillfully translated into external reading, they end up becoming extremely funny books.
I always like to compare this Wilde creation with the Nobody pays hereby Darío Fo. Fresh works, with abundant humor that make you laugh years and years after being written. It's funny, but literature can still be humorous, while a series or film outside its time of creation is easily left without its original grace. Things of the imagination, always more powerful than screens ... Hence, this work has climbed to the second place on my list.
Because Oscar Wilde also laughed a lot, mainly at a world constrained by his morals. But this mockery, appropriately disguised as a farce, could teach the public of its time to laugh at themselves. And who knows, perhaps thanks to humor and works like this, change could have emerged. A society that is ridiculed but that is capable of laughing at itself is more prone to change ...
Salomé
But before the glory in the theater, Oscar Wilde had already savored the repudiation with this play that scandalized everyone (at least from the outside).
Originally written in French, praised by Mallarmé and Maeterlinck, it was published in Paris in 1893, and a year later it was translated into English. Provocative and incendiary, Salomé knew censorship and repudiation, was played by Sarah Bernhardt and banned in England for representing biblical characters. Richard Strauss's opera garnered fierce criticism at its US premiere, leading to the cancellation of all its performances.
Oscar Wilde, sentenced to two years of forced labor for public defamation against modesty, could not witness its premiere on February 11, 1896 at the Théâtre de l'OEuvre in Paris.
This edition of Red Fox Books reproduces uncensored the exquisite original illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley, created for the English edition of the work, published in London in 1894, and includes the preliminary note written by Robert Ross for the 1907 edition. translation into Spanish, it was made by Rafael Cansinos Assens in 1919.
How to Live Aligned with Juan Herranz, one of the most brilliant reviewers (and literary critics) of all time. Your descriptions are highly rated. Two greetings 😉
Without a doubt, Wilde, one of the most brilliant writers (and thinkers) of all time known. Very well described his works, by the way. All the best.