The Complete Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde

You should be able to tell what The Complete Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde is about from the title: a collection of all the fairy tales that Wilde wrote, which includes two books, The Happy Prince and Other Tales and A House of Pomegranates. The stories are around ten pages each, and all have interesting and meaningful morals. I am going to write about  one short story in particular, and then on Wilde's writing.

My favorite story from the whole of the book was "The Nightingale and the Rose," a heartbreaking tale of death and lost love. Actually, love was crushed by a wagon wheel in the icky gutter in this story. It opens with a lovesick student's cries of despair: the professor's daughter will only dance with him if he brings her a red rose, but there is no such flower to be found in the student's garden. A nightingale pities the student in his distress, and decides she must find him a red rose to take to the professor's daughter. Unfortunately, the only way to get a red rose is for the bird to press her heart against a thorn of the dead red rose bush and sing all night, which would cost the nightingale her life, but she does it anyway, for the sake of love. In the morning, the bird is dead, but the student takes the rose to the girl. Here's the horrible part: the girl says, when presented with the most beautiful rose ever to grow on this earth, "I'm afraid it will not go with my dress," and throws the flower in the gutter, so the student gives up on love and goes back to philosophy. The theme here is... love is stupid? Love only leads to death and philosophy is better? I don't know, to be honest. I think that love is beautiful and necessary to true happiness in this life, and many of Wilde's other stories in the book come to that conclusion, but this one does not. Perhaps "The Nightingale and the Rose" is something of a retelling of one of Wilde's personal experiences with love... (This is the part where you stop reading and comment, because I could actually use some insight here. Anyone?) Anyway, whether with or without a moral, the story was lovely to read, as well as all the others. Which brings me to the next topic...

I found all of Wilde's stories to be beautifully written, and thoroughly enjoyed most of them, whether sad or amusing. The problem I had while reading this book was that the language was a little difficult, and though it wasn't hard enough that I couldn't understand the stories or appreciate them, the fact that I occasionally had to look up words or infer their meaning sometimes took away from the stories in and of themselves. However, this may not be an issue for some, and may deter others from giving Wilde's work a chance. Also, I found that there wasn't as much room for characterization in the short stories as there is in a novel, so I missed the connection between myself and the characters which I so love in books usually. All in all, though, I really enjoyed this book, and would recommend it to anyone who is okay with a measure of sadness and is up for the slightly challenging language. A-