Favorite first line?

“I am an angry man; I am a spiteful man.” Dostoyevski, “Notes from Underground”

I thought this was one of those universally accepted truths. Nevertheless,

“I am Myra Breckinridge, whom no man may possess.”

Isn’t the opening line of Lolita “Lo. Lo-lee. Lo-lee-tah.” or somesuch? Doesn’t seem very gripping to me.

I feel guilty about the thread-drift so early, but “I was born a poor black child” has to be the best opening line from a movie, I’d think.

No, no.

“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.”

It is gripping.

But the line that always gets me is, “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.”

Also on a Nabokovian note, “An oblong puddle inset in the coarse asphalt; like a fancy footprint filled to the brim with quicksilver; like a spatulate hole through which you can see the nether sky.” (Bend Sinister) OK, it’s not so catchy, but it’s quite an image, and one that recurs in interesting ways throughout the novel.

And then there’s Nabokov’s play on another striking opening line, “‘All happy families are more or less dissimilar; all unhappy ones are more or less alike,’ says a great Russian writer in the beginning of a famous novel (Anna Arkadievitch Karenina, transfigured into English by R. G. Stonelower, Mount Tabor Ltd., 1880).” (Ada)

Finally, there’s the Borges story “Las ruinas circulares,” opening with “Nadie lo vio desembarcar en la unánime noche….” (It’s a long sentence, but “unanimous night.” It’s just cool!)

Sorry. Inner literature nerd struggling to get out after days of nothing but physics.

two of my favorites, Thomas Pynchon short, and Thomas Pynchon long.

Thomas Pynchon short:
“A screaming came across the sky”
-Gravity’s Rainbow.

Thomas Pynchon long:
“Snow-Balls have flown their Arcs, starr’d the Sides of Outbuildings, as of Cousins, carried Hats away into the brisk Wind off Delaware,–the Sleds are brought in and their Runners carefully dried and greased, shoes deposited in the back Hall, a stocking’d-foot Descent made upon the great Kitchen, in a purposeful Dither since Morning, punctuated by the ringing Lids of various Boilers and Stewing-Pots, fragrant with Pie-Spices, peel’d Fruits, Suet, heated Sugar,–the Children, having all upon the Fly, among rhythmic slaps of Batter and Spoon, coax’d and stolen what they might, porceed, as upon each afternoon all this snowy Advent, to a comfortable Room at the rear of the House, years since given over to their carefree Assaults.

I have a few that I have always enjoyed.

“In M.–, an important town in northern Italy, the widowed Marquise of O–, a lady of unblemished reputation and the mother of several well-brought-up children, inserted the following announcement in the newspapes: that she had, without knowledge of the cause, come to find herself in a certain situation; that she would like the father of the child she was expecting to disclose his idenity to her; and that she was resolved, out of consideration for her family, to marry him.”
-“The Marquise of O–” by Heinrich von Kleist

“The long, long road over the moors and up into the forest–who trod it into being first of all? Man, a human being, the first that came here. There was no path before he came. Afterward, some beast or other, following the faint tracks over marsh and moorland, wearing them deeper; after these again some Lapp gained scent of the path, and took that way from field to field, looking to his reindeer. Thus was made the road through the great Almenning–the common tracts without an owner; no man’s land.”
–Growth of Soil by Knut Hamsun (I know it’s a whole paragraph, and not just a line, but it’s worth it)

A little less snooty:
“Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly priimitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.”
–Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

I also like the opening to Love in the Time of Cholera, but can’t find it.

marksteen you’ve gone done and truncated your Pynchon:

“A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.”  

That’s the complete first sentence and needful is it’s completeness. Here’s the rest of the graph, Pynchon in high Jeremiad mode, it’s even more prophetic than when I first read it almost 20 years ago:

“It is too late. The Evacuation still proceeds, but it’s all theatre. There are no lights inside the cars. No light anywhere. Above him lift girders old as an iron queen, and glass somewhere far above that would let the light of day through. But it’s night. He’s afraid of the way the glass will fall — soon — it will be a spectacle: the fall of a crystal palace. But coming down in total blackout, without one glint of light, only great invisible crashing.”

As an undergraduate I had the good fortune to study Christian theology with the radical death of God theologian Thomas J.J. Altizer. He’s written much on the epic in the Apocalyptic Christian tradition, from Dante through Milton, Blake, Melville and Joyce. I spent a great deal of intellectual effort in an attempt to get him to slog through Gravity’s Rainbow but I think Finnegan’s Wake just tuckered him out.

BTW,

Cheney is Blicero
 

Oops, my bad. That is in fact a period and not a comma. But somehow I feel compelled to add what follows. It just doesn’t read the same without it.

Geeze, I wish Opera didn’t cache pages as long as it does. Sorry for the redundant mistyping.

Zelazny’s book got both the Hugo and the Nebula, it seems. Hightly recommended.

Favourite first lines? Nothing can compete against:

“No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.”

nick, I hate to say it, but that first line would not so much make me put the book down as make me throw it across the room. That’s not catchy: that’s an author in love with the sound of his own voice.

Anyway, a grab-bag of favourites:

“I often dream about the Dolphin Hotel.
    In these dreams, I’m there, implicated in some kind of ongoing circumstance. All indications are that I belong to this dream continuity.
    The Dolphin Hotel is distorted, much too narrow. It seems more like a long, covered bridge. A bridge stretching endlessly through time. And there I am, in the middle of it. Someone else is there too, crying.
    The hotel envelops me. I can feel its pulse, its heat. In dreams, I am part of the hotel.” —Haruki Murakami (as translated by Alfred Birnbaum), Dance Dance Dance.

“I lost my own father at 12 yr. of age and know what it is to be raised on lies and silences my dear daughter you are presently too young to understand a word I write but this history is for you and will contain no single lie may I burn in Hell if I speak false.” —Peter Carey, True History of the Kelly Gang.

“It was a filthy profession, but the money was addicting, and one addiction led to another, and they were all going to hell.” —Po Bronson, Bombardiers, which is a truly terrible novel that I inexplicably read again and again.

And of course the famous epigrams from Pride and Prejudice and Anna Karenina.

I had a couple of others, but I’m blanking out on what they were.

Personally, I prefer an opening that is great in retrospect, a beginning found mete when one reaches the end.

I dislike gimmicky first paragraphs. Apologies to the Douglas Adams fans, but yes, that’s you I’m grousing about.

With that said:

“Towards the end of a sultry afternoon in late July a young man came out of his little room in Stolyarny Lane and turned slowly and somewhat irresolutely in the direction of Kamenny Bridge.”

  –obvious

“On a hill by the Mississippi where Chippewas camped two generations ago, a girl stood in relief against the cornflower blue of Nothern sky.”

  –slightly less obvious

“As a junior of exceptional promise, he had been sent to Egypt for a year in order to improve his Arabic and found himself attached to the High Commission as a sort of scribe to await his first diplomatic posting; be he was already conducting himself as a young secretary of legation, fully aware of the responsibilities of future office. Only somehow today it was rather more difficult than usual to be reserved, so exciting had the fish drive become.”

  –Lawrence Durrell, “Mountolive”

My bad, it’s actually “watched” not “heard”. Additionally, Jay Nordlinger at NRO did a reader survey on best first lines of books. Look at the last bullet point here: http://www.nationalreview.com/impromptus/impromptus112702.asp

That’s an obvious one all right. All of Kafka’s stories have great openings. I love the first paragraph of The Castle too. Both in German and in the English translation:

“Es war spät abends, als K. ankam. Das Dorf lag in tiefem Schnee. Vom Schloßberg war nichts zu sehen, Nebel und Finsternis umgaben ihn, auch nicht der schwächste Lichtschein deutete das große Schloß an. Lange stand K. auf der Holzbrücke, die von der Landstraße zum Dorf führte, und blickte in die scheinbare Leere empor.”

“It was late in the evening when K. arrived. The village was deep in snow. The Castle hill has hidden, veiled in mist and darkness, nor was there even a glimmer of light to show that a castle was there. On the wooden bridge leading from the main road to the village, K. stood for a long time gazing into the illusory emptiness above him.”

Another favourite is an even more obvious choice: “Sing Goddess, of the anger of Achilleus, son of Peleus, the accursed anger which brought uncounted anguish on the Achaeians”, and the rest of the whole first paragraph. I didn’t study ancient Greek so obviously I haven’t read the original.

Just goes to show how precious the work of good translators is.

Can’t beat the classics:

“It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents–except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.”

–E. Bulwer-Lytton, “Paul Clifford”

“Three men at McAlester State Penitentiary had larger penises then Lamar Pye, but all were black and therefore, by Lamar’s own figuring, hardly human at all.”

-Dirty White Boys, Stephen Hunter

“Marley was dead, to begin with.”
-A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens

The latter is probably my favorite. At some point, I started believing it meant more than that Marley was dead at the beginning of the story. It meant that Marley had always been dead, even when alive. Scrooge on the otherhand, had been alive in his youth.

I’ve always heard the first line of Metamorphosis translated as “gigantic insect.” A little googling and I discovered that vermin is the more popular choice, although dung beetle, cockroach and bug are other choices. The short film “Franz Kafka’s It’s a Wonderful Life” has an interesting take on the formation of that sentence by the way.

I second the nomination of One Hundred Years of Solitude:
“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

I also love the opening paragraph of Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie.

Finally, the first sentence of Richard III is actually. It doesn’t make sense to cut it off after “discontent” just as it doesn’t make sense to quote “to thine own self be true” without acknowledging that the speaker of that line is a pompous ass.

Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York;
And all the clouds that lowered upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.

Besides, the “is” in that sentence is an auxiliary verb; the main verb is “made.” If you cut out “made” then “is” becomes the main verb, which is not what Shakespeare intended.

I seem to remember a line from Lawrence Durrell perhaps from “Clea” – day turned into day in the calendar of desire.” I havent’ read that for 40 years and that line has always stuck with me.

To the red country and part of the grey country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth.

Is it chance that this post, AND MANY OF THE COMMENTS, follow exactly a NPR story this morning? who is ripping off whom?

It doesn’t make sense to cut it off after “discontent”

Damn. Back to school after all!

Found another, that i maybe should have put first : one of these books that got you smiling all along. I quote the first page : titles are important in this case :

”
PROLEGOMENES A TOUTE CRASHITUDE

Fiction Spinoziste n°1

Le cadavre est au bord de la route, une de ses mains est prise dans le bitume gluant. […] Je retourne le mort du bout de ma botte de lézard mauve. C’est bien ce que j’attends : un Néo-Punk
”

Jean Bernard Pouy, “Spinoza encule Hegel” 1979. Title says it all, innit?

Think mad max before mad max, with warring “Young Hegelian” and “Fraction Armée Spinoziste” clans, and their marxists, jdanovians, maoists etc little buddies. Add nortons and guzzis on top of it. Jubilating.

Approximately : “the corpse is along the road, of of his hands is glued to the slimy asphalt. […] I move the corpse with the end of my mauve lizard boot. What i had expected : a Neo-Punk.”

I’m amazed that nobody has mentioned my favorite:

“It was a bright cold day in april, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”

Also, I can’t resist mentioning my favorite opening line from film:

“The dream is always the same.”

(Maybe it’s a generational thing…)

Well, I can’t say it’s the best hook, since the book’s been sitting unread on my shelf for several years now, but Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward starts:

“On top of everything else, the cancer ward was number 13.”

“Martel was angry. He did not even adjust his blood away from anger.”
–Cordwainer Smith, “Scanners Live in Vain”

“Horselover Fat’s nervous breakdown began the day he got the phonecall from Gloria asking if he had any Nembutals. He asked her why she wanted them and she said that she intended to kill herself. She was calling everyone she knew. By now she had fifty of them, but she needed thirty or forty more to be on the safe side.”

–Philip K. Dick, “Valis”

Phooey on me for having forgotten “Scanners” when there’s at least two copies on the shelf in front of me. Cordwainer Smith’s great on both titles and beginnings.

And what about knock-out last lines? I’ll put in a kopeck for the final two sentences of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

“Either forswear fucking others or the affair is over.” –Philip Roth, Sabbath’s Theater

Anthony Burgess, _Earthly Powers_:

bq. It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.

Paul Auster does particularly compelling first paragraphs. Try reading the first paragraphs of The New York Trilogy or Moon Palace and then putting them down.

Kind of middlebrow, but I’ve always loved, “The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.” from Stephen King’s “The Gunslinger.” Simple, and yet really evocative. And not a non sequitur. Too many opening sentences seem to grab your attention and then lack payoff.

And then “Slaughterhouse 5,” which starts with “All this happened, more or less,” and then continues with something like “Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time.”

Catcher in the Rye: “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going in to it, if you want to know the truth.”

Good stuff.

It may be overly romantic and Gothic, but the one first line I can remember from the moment of reading it is:

“Last night I dreamt I dwelt at Manderley again.”
— Daphne DuMaurier, Rebecca.