Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories (Oscar Wilde)

Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories
Oscar Wilde
Naxos Audiobook
Fiction, Collection/Humor/Literary Fiction
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: A grim prognostication leads a young lord to desperate measures... an aged and proper English ghost is driven to his wit's end by the new American tenants of his ancestral home... a man consoles a friend about a mysterious lost love... Six stories by Oscar Wilde are collected here:
Lord Arthur Savile's Crime: A "chiromantist" - reader of hands - at a socialite's party convinces the gullible Lord Savile that he's destined to commit a heinous crime, so he determines to get it over and done with before his impending nuptials... only to find murder is far from easy.
The Canterville Ghost: When an American family purchases an old English estate, they also inherit its irascible ghost, who doesn't know what to do with the unaristocratic and utterly unruly foreigners.
The Portrait of Mr. W. H.: A dinner discussion ignites a passion for an alternative solution to the mysteries of Shakespeare's sonnets.
The Model Millionaire: A young man has a fateful encounter with an artist's model.
The Sphinx Without a Secret - An Etching: One man's dream girl hides a mysterious double life... or does she?
The Birthday of the Infanta: A young Spanish princess's birthday party features musicians, a mock bull fight, a puppet play, and a boy dwarf dancer who tragically misunderstands his circumstances.

REVIEW: Once in a while I take a run at classics, which I find sometimes go down easier in audiobook format. This collection gathers a handful of stories from one of the more famous English writers, and while they can still be entertaining, they also can't help but bear traces of their time (quite notable in certain racial depictions), particularly in their tendency to draw themselves out with verbal meanderings that don't always contribute to the story.
The first story is riddled with social satire and caricatures of 19th century socialites (and others), an amusing and sometimes silly send-up of a self-fulfilling prophecy. When the glorified palmist predicts Lord Savile will murder a distant relative, he starts going through the family Rolodex (or the period equivalent) to find a suitable candidate, as he can't possibly get married with a future felony hanging over his head... but his efforts keep failing him. Along the way, he inadvertently discovers a new perspective on life as he pushes outside his posh comfort zone.
The Canterville Ghost reads like an old Disney family movie from before Disney Studios existed, with very silly overtones and goofy, slapstick antics. The ghost - depicted as essentially an immortal prima donna actor who has never before failed to master an audience - tears his metaphoric hair as the Americans not only refuse to be properly frightened out of their wits, but treat the phantom as a vaguely irritating house guest at best and a laughingstock at worst. The ending veers away from the borderline-cartoony earlier tale into something more sentimental and philosophical, the two parts not quite matching. Some nice imagery and a few chuckles, but overall it was too dippy for my tastes.
The third tale would've been barely more than flash fiction had Wilde not spent so much time rehashing and reprinting and re-analyzing Shakespeare's sonnets (which his target audience was likely more than familiar with) in pursuit of a fictional alternate theory as to whom the legendary bard was addressing in the sometimes-cryptic verses. The theory takes on a life and passion of its own, ending friendships and even a life or two in its fervor before passing on to the next listener. It seems to be more of a study of literary enthusiasts and the dangers of obsession.
The shortest tale in the collection, The Model Millionaire never really develops its story and still takes too many words to reach an obvious ending.
The Sphinx Without a Secret sets itself up as a riff on the old tale of the lover with the secret that must never be pried into (only for the other half of the partnership to be unable to resist the mystery, dooming their future happiness), but never quite feels like it earns the tragic ending it delivers.
The last story is the saddest, though it also feels like one with the most padding, painstakingly establishing the girl princess's father and deceased mother and scheming uncle and more, then plodding through the majority of the party before arriving at the dancing dwarf who - only recently sold into servitude by his charcoal-burner father after a carefree childhood in the forests, entirely innocent in the ways of the "civilized" world or the cruelties of the aristocracy - fails to recognize the dangers in trusting a princess. The final line twists a knife.
While Wilde paints some interesting (if inherently exaggerated) characters and makes many pithy observations and one-liners, the stories do show their age. Additionally, the whole presentation suffered from prolonged musical interludes - not just between stories, but between "chapters" within each of the longer stories. A quick bit to signal a scene change might've worked okay, but these were far too long and grew rather annoying, especially when I could never be sure if they were signalling a switch to a new story or just a very long pause in the same tale. They helped weigh the collection down in the ratings, even though overall I found them more engaging than I'd expected, given my hit-and-miss history with classics.

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