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Openers

YOU HAVE TO START SOMEWHERE

I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.

--Jeffrey Eugenides, first sentence of Middlesex

The big man lived in the janitor's closet behind the bar, and through the night you could hear him building birdhouses.

--Christopher Goffard, first sentence of Snitch Jacket

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

--Gabriel Garcia Marquez, first sentence of One Hundred Years Of Solitude

What's your favorite first sentence of a novel?

Comments

Re: Openers

Great topic and great choices, Tom. The Eugenides and Marquez openings are right up there with the very best. Here are a couple I like, both from the same writer, my favorite, J.M. Coetzee.

"The blow catches him from the right, sharp and surprising and painful, like a bolt of electricity, lifting him up off the bicycle."
Slow Man

"For a man of his age, 52, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well."
Disgrace

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"The madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through." -- The Corrections (an incomplete sentence, but a great one)

"It was a pleasure to burn. It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed." -- Fahrenheit 451

"It was midsummer, the heat rippling above the macadam roads. Cicadas screaming out of the trees and the sky like pewter, glaring." -- "Heat" (actually, a Joyce Carol Oates short story, but still)

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When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.
The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley

He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.
Ernest Hemingway, The Old man and the Sea

In the tunnel where I was raped, a tunnel that was once an underground entry to an amphitheater, a place where actors burst forth from underneath the seats of a crowd, a girl had been murdered and dismembered.
Lucky (a memoir) by Alice Sebold

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"A Screaming Comes Across the Sky." -- Gravity's Rainbow

"They're out there." -- One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

"It was a bad time. Billy Boy Watkins was dead, and so was Frenchie Tucker. Billy Boy had died of fright, scared to death on the field of battle, and Frenchie Tucker had been shot through the nose. Bernie Lynn and Lt. Sydney Martin had died in tunnels. Pederson was dead and Rudy Chassler was dead. Ready Mix was dead. They were all among the dead. Rain fed fungus that grew in the men's boots and socks, and their socks rotted, and their feet turned white and soft so that the skin could be scraped off with a fingernail, and Stink Harris woke up screaming one night with a leech on his tongue." -- Going After Cacciato

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Okay, I'll seriously stop posting. But I beseech everyone to read the first few pages of Colum McCann's "Let the Great World Spin" on amazon.com.

Amazing opening to a (new) book.

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These three always stayed with me.

"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."
-- Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."
-- Neuromancer, by William Gibson

"He speaks in your voice, American, and there's a shine in his eye that's halfway hopeful."
-- Underworld, by Don Delillo

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"Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse. Like the credulous widow who wakes up one day to find the charming young man and all her savings gone, so the consenting subject of a piece of nonfiction writing learns - when the article or book appears - his hard lesson."

The Journalist and the Murderer, by Janet Malcolm

Re: Openers

"The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it."
V.S. Naipaul, "A Bend in the River."
Like it or hate it, this opening let's you know right away that you're in the hands of a narrator with a strong point of view.

Re: Openers

OK, Raja, but if you believe that, shouldn't you quit?

Re: Openers

Well I don't know that this gangrey assignment was about picking novel openings that we agree with (by that logic we might conclude that Drew agrees with Humbert by quoting the opening of Lolita) rather just some of our favorites.

That being said, I do think there is some truth to Janet Malcom's assessment of our roles. We all know that we interview people who may be better off if they didn't speak with us, or by letting us into their lives are exposing aspects they may not want to later see on the printed page or the computer screen (or the blackberry). We may spend time wooing and convincing reticent subjects knowing that when the story comes out it may not be all positive and they may not be happy. No reporter walks into a first interview saying, "You're a little crazy and this profile I'm writing will show that." That's not to say we're intentionally betraying our subjects per se, but if our intentions are hidden from our subjects, isn't that at least bordering on... misleading?

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This is an excellent new topic, actually.

Does anyone go in and lay every single card on the table from the beginning?

How much are we obligated to tell our subjects before they agree to give us access?

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"Does anyone go in and lay every single card on the table from the beginning?"

I never did this at a newspaper assignment. I did it on a magazine story, and it worked splendidly well, but it was because I was dealing with people who I knew would come off as looking foreign and alien to the readers of the magazine.

This was my "Generation Gap" story where I followed around high schoolers at an inner-city school. (http://tinyurl.com/generationgap)

Part of my pitch to the kids I followed was, "I'm going to follow you around. I'm going to talk to your teachers and your parents and friends about you. At some point, you will be irritated with me. When I write the story, I'll probably include some details you don't want the world to know. But I can promise you that I will listen. And I will tell you every single thing that I'm going to publish about you before it goes in. But you won't be able to change it. But if you disagree, I'll give you a chance to defend yourself or tell me why they're wrong. I will listen to you. I will trust you. But you'll have to trust me."

That scared off several kids. But the ones I got were willing and able to deal with it.

By the time this thing published, they were all sick and tired of me, just like I promised.

I was happy with the end result and none of them complained after it was published. One kid called and said, "I don't like everything you wrote. But it's all pretty much true."

Re: Openers

I guess it probably just depends on the situation. For example, if you're trying to talk to someone in prison, or someone who's been written about a lot, or someone who's never been written about and is apprehensive, or someone who would never, ever talk to you unless you "lay the cards on the table", then I guess I probably would, and maybe I have.

But usually, I don't do it. I just try and get the access and then make it completely clear that I'm writing a story, and everything is fair game. I also think that it's tricky because something you say when fanning the cards out on the table could change, obviously, because stories change so much. Subjects change. When you get to know them, they do. It's all so very complicated. Something you said at the beginning could turn out to be a lie in the end.

Re: Openers

The one book opening I've never been able to shake:

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.

-Hemingway, Farewell to Arms

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"The country is most barbarously large and final."
Billy Lee Brammer, The Gay Place

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We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville, Tennessee, in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child.

A Death in the Family, Agee

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Dan -- I love that Hemingway beginning too. Strangely, though, I could never finish the book.

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Let's talk, also, about endings. This one's stuck with me for 25 years. I remember throwing that little paperback across my room in anger. It's like it happened yesterday. This is the one sentence, I think, that made me want to write stories.

"He loved Big Brother."

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I've been flipping through the books on my bookshelf. Many of my favorite novels have very unspectacular beginnings...

Re: Openers

I'm gonna take a couple of liberties on the topic just because I think this is one of the best parts in any book, ever.

The first paragraph (that's just a few sentences, right??) of the second chapter (that's close to the beginning, right??) of the Great Gatsby.

"About halfway between West Egg and New York the motor road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes -- a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke, and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of the ash-grey men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight."

Re: Openers

Love this thread! I'm finding new books to read, thanks to all of you. Please keep posting. This is great inspiration.

Can someone post the intro to All the Pretty Horses? I can't find my book anywhere tonight.


"On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below."
The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder

"In the town there were two mutes, and they were always together. Early every morning they would come out from the house where they lived and walk arm in arm down the street to work. The two friends were very different."
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers

"Knowing that Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with a heart trouble, great care was taken to break to her as gently as possible the news of her husband's death."
The Story of an Hour, Kate Chopin

"The grandmother didn't want to go to Florida. She wanted to visit some of her connections in east Tennessee and she was seizing at every chance to change Bailey's mind. Bailey was the son she lived with, her only boy. He was sitting on the edge of his chair at the table, bent over the orange sports section of the Journal. 'Now look here, Bailey,' she said, 'see here, read this,' and she stood with one hand on her thin hip and the other rattling the newspaper at his bald head. 'Here this fellow that calls himself The Misfit is aloose from the Federal Pen and headed toward Florida and you read here what it says he did to these people. Just you read it. I wouldn't take my children in any direction with a criminal like that aloose in it. I couldn't answer to my conscience if I did.'
A Good Man is Hard to Find, Flannery O'Connor

"My mother eats things she finds dead on the road. Her standards are high."
Dead on the Road, Bailey White (an essay from the book, Mama Makes Up Her Mind. Delightfully quirky and comfy and funny.)

Re: Openers

"Leon Hubbard died 10 minutes into lunch break on the first Monday in May, on the construction site of the new one-story trauma wing at Holy Redeemer Hospital in South Philadelphia. One way or the other, he was going to lose the job."

Pete Dexter, God's Pocket, 1983

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"Neither of the Grimes sisters would have a happy life, and looking back it always seemed that the trouble began with their parents' divorce."
Richard Yates, The Easter Parade

and a plug for my old professor, who talked me into this godforsaken writing business...

"Robert Elgin died on the street, knocked down and run over by a Second Avenue bus while pursuing a woman he thought he could not live without."

Sam Ligon, Safe in Heaven Dead

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"He was born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad." -- Rafael Sabatini, "Scaramouche"

"Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board." --Zora Neale Hurston, "Their Eyes Were Watching God"

"Daddy said it was a bedsheet, a fitted bedsheet, and he said she was wearing it up on her shoulders like a cape with two of the corners knotted around her neck." -- T.R. Pearson, "A Short History of a Small Place"

"You better not never tell nobody but God." -- Alice Walker, "The Color Purple"

Re: Openers

Lolita is my favorite.

This one's up there, too: "I come from Des Moines. Someone had to." -- The Lost Continent by Bill Bryson.

And if you're going to quote Orwell's ending in this thread, you must include the opening line.

"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen." -- Nineteen Eighty Four.

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I almost forgot this opener from a book that I could never finish, but made me laugh repeatedly for the first several chapters because of the ridiculousness of the writing:

"Studs Lonigan, on the verge of fifteen, and wearing his first suit of long trousers, stood in the bathroom with a Sweet Caporal pasted in his mug. His hands were jammed in his trouser pockets, and he sneered. He puffed, drew the fag out of his mouth, inhaled and said to himself:
Well, I'm kissin' the old dump goodbye tonight." -- Young Lonigan by James T. Farrell

Re: Openers

one more:

"Where's Papa going with that ax?" said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.
"Out to the hoghouse," replied Mrs. Arable. "Some pigs were born last night."

Charlotte's Web, E.B. White.

I will also go on record saying it is one of the best endings ever written.

Re: Openers

"He was tall, about fifty, with darkly handsome, almost sinister features: a neatly trimmed mustache, hair turning silver at the temples, and eyes so black they were like the tinted windows of a sleek limousine-he could see out, but you couldn't see in."

John Berendt, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

I love this one but always wonder: Should he have ended the sentence nine words sooner?

Re: Openers

"On the floor beneath the window of a small, dusky room lay my father, remarkably long and all dressed in white; the toes of his feet were strangely widespread, and the fingers of his gentle hands, now quietly crossed on his breast, were likewise distorted. The dark discs of copper coins closed his laughing eyes, his kind face had become livid, and I was terrified by the glint of his set teeth."
--Childhood, Maxim Gorky

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