1800-ISHMAEL – Call Me
‘As Gregor Samsa woke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.‘
A beetle? A cockroach? Depends on which entomological school you come from. But most readers agree that Franz Kafka’s opener in his novella, Metamorphosis is among the world library’s best, as first sentences go.
Stephen Romei’s lively lit-blog – A Ragged Pair of Claws - ran a browser’s poll last month, asking for the other welterweight candidates. Like moths to flame, the bookworms responded, voting Vladmir Nabokov’s non-verb rhapsody opening Lolita as the jewel:
‘Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.’
True, it is spectacular. Same can be said about that whole first paragraph – the tripping of the tongue to help pronounce his paramour – but hey, we’re talking two sentences. Let’s fight fair.
Combing the other nominees I found the famous and familiar, including George Orwell’s bung chronometers of 1984:
‘It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.‘
And these below, with the book’s title and its author reduced to their initials. Can you figure out each notable source, and going one better – which novel opener close to your heart warrants a laurel?
‘Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’ [AK by LT]
‘Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.’ [TBA by MA]
‘The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.’[TGB BY LPH]
‘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 into it, if you want to know the truth.’ [ACITR by JDS]
‘We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.’ [FALILV by HST]
‘Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again.’ [R by DDM]
‘Harry Joy was to die three times, but it was his first death which was to have the greatest effect on him, and it is this first death which we shall now witness.’ [B by PC]
‘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.’ [EP by AB]
Have a rival? Send in a few more podium finishers among the openers.