SOUNDTRACK: hiatus
[READ: December 24, 2021] “The Young King”
This year, S. ordered me The Short Story Advent Calendar. This is my seventh time reading the Calendar. The 2021 Short Story Advent Calendar is a deluxe box set of individually bound short stories.
As always, each story is a surprise, so you won’t know what you’re getting until you crack the seal every morning starting December 1. Once you’ve read that day’s story, check this link where editor Alberto Manguel is providing daily commentary on each of the stories he selected for this year’s calendar.
I was pretty delighted that Oscar Wilde was selected for this short story (with the caveat that there are hundreds of more recent Irish short story writers to choose from of course). And it started off with Wilde’s wit with the king’s courtiers needing Etiquette lessons because most of them still had natural manners–a very grave offense.
But then, good lord, this story dragged on so torturously.
A 16 year old lad is named to be the next king. He was raised by goatherds so he is blown away by the sumptuousness of the castle. But, as is the case with children’s stories, of which this is apparently one, he has three bad dreams.
Long dreams. Elaborately detailed and yet rather tedious dreams.
The first one is about how the weavers who make his garment are so very poor. They are practically slaves.
In the second his is on a ship where young negro slaves are rowing and one is forced to dive into the water to retrieve pearls. The slave gets a huge pearl and then dies and is tossed overboard. The shipmaster says the pearl will go on his scepter.
In the third dream the men digging up rubies for his crown are all killed by plague
The young king refuses to don any of the kingly garb, but the peasants yell at him saying that they rely on his affluence to make their living. That working for a master is better than not working at all.
The soldiers set out to kill the young king for not being kingly but, amazingly enough, some twenty pages later, god intervenes.
This felt like one too many stories in this collection with an aggressively pitched moral.
Leave a Reply