23. The picture of Dorian Gray

It is not that I haven't liked the book. It is impossible not to recognize the idea is great. Who would not feel tempted to be forever young, not to suffer the effects of the passage of time, not to show in our faces the lines of our regrets?

But I think an idea so good deserved much more lines. Wilde goes straight to the point, whereas I wish the story was developed into something longer. I missed further details on why Mr Gray turns into a persona non grata among decent people, especially decent women. Had the book been written by an author like Alexandre Dumas or Chordelos de Laclos, for instance, we might have had a whole description of his cruel adventures.

I know, maybe I’m too Latina, but that’s the way I felt about it. I probably feel this way because I liked it so much that I could not accept it was so short. The end of the story is predictable, but one feels that it simply could not have ended in another way.