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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

Re: Openers

"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)

Re: Openers

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.

Re: Openers

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

Re: Openers

"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?

Re: Openers

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?

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

Re: Openers

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

Re: Openers

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

Re: Openers

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."

Re: Openers

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

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

Re: Openers

"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

Re: Openers

"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"

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