Hello, my name is Finn, and I'm going to help you understand this book.
Here it is, explained like you are 10:
Oscar Wilde wrote these four fairy tales in the richest, most beautiful words he could find. One is about a young king who dreams strange dreams the night before he is crowned. One is about a princess whose birthday party turns sad. One is about a fisherman who loves a mermaid, a sea girl with a tail instead of legs. And one is about a star child, a beautiful boy who must learn to be kind.
The four tales tell of a young king troubled by dreams on the eve of his crowning, of a little princess whose birthday dancer brings joy and sorrow into the palace, of a fisherman who falls in love with a mermaid and must give up his own soul to be with her, and of the Star Child, a beautiful boy whose cruelty is answered by a cruel change in his own face.
Oscar Wilde built the book as four separate fairy tales, each complete in itself, written in his richest prose. The sentences are full of jewels, flowers, gold and ceremony, described so thickly that the pages seem to glow. Under the decoration, each story is built on a hard question about beauty, love or sacrifice, and Wilde does not always give the comfortable answer.
It works because the beauty and the sadness are both real. The tales look like the fairy stories children know, then quietly go deeper and darker than expected. Older readers feel the sting in them, and younger ones feel the wonder, and both remember the images for years. Almost nobody else has ever written fairy tales anything like these.
A House of Pomegranates, published in 1891, is Oscar Wilde's second collection of fairy tales, and it is the stranger, darker book. Its four stories, 'The Young King', 'The Birthday of the Infanta', 'The Fisherman and His Soul' and 'The Star-Child', are written in Wilde's ornate prose, dense with jewels and gardens, and each turns on beauty, cruelty and sacrifice. These are tales meant as much for adults as for children, gorgeous on the surface and devastating underneath.
A House of Pomegranates, published in 1891, is Oscar Wilde's second collection of fairy tales, after The Happy Prince and Other Tales, and it is the stranger, darker book. Its four stories, 'The Young King', 'The Birthday of the Infanta', 'The Fisherman and His Soul' and 'The Star-Child', are written in Wilde's most ornate prose, dense with jewels, gardens and ceremony, and each turns on beauty, cruelty and sacrifice. These are fairy tales aware of their own artifice, meant as much for adults as for children, and nobody else has ever written tales like them: sumptuous and devout at once, gorgeous on the surface and quietly devastating underneath.
Starvard carries A House of Pomegranates because Wilde's two tale books belong together, and this second, stranger volume completes the pair on our shelf beside the first. It earns its place on quality alone: four stories, each polished like a jewel, that reward slow reading and rereading. Older children ready for fairy tales with shadows in them, adults who think they have outgrown the form, and anyone who loves beautiful prose for its own sake will find these stories unlike anything else in the library, and impossible to forget once read.
Edition: The title's spelling, Pomegranates, is Wilde's own. Text: Project Gutenberg ebook 873.
The first chapter
PAGE
The Young King
1
The Birthday of the Infanta
31
The Fisherman and his Soul
73
The Star-child
147
Source: Project Gutenberg. Published 1891. Public domain. Share this book: WhatsApp
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