Great First Lines

Saras said that she'd once been told on a creative writing course that the first line of a story should make you spill your coffee. Whilst not actually wanting to get my books any more messed up with food and drink than they already are, I have to agree that a whole lot of promise has to be coiled up in those first few words.

A sort of meme thing about best first lines seems to be being passed around among litbloggers : Edward Champion (whom I found via this post on the subject by Bud Parr) seems to be the guy who kicked off the challenge in his search for:

... an opening sentence so utterly irresistible, something that is so unquestionably curious and so absolutely tantalizing that you, as a reader, simply must read the whole thing!

And I, of course, am only too happy to pass the challenge on to you!

I think my favourite has to be the opening of Graham Greene's Brighton Rock and remember the pleasure with which I settled down to read it:

Hale knew they meant to murder him before he had been in Brighton three hours.

The opening line of marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude is another classic:

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.

And then there's the audacity of Burgess in Earthly Powers :

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.

I love too the way that Katherine Mansfield begins some of her short stories as if she's picking up the threads of an earlier conversation, so that you feel invited into a confidence, which is a pretty neat trick, if you think about it. The Garden Party for example begins:

And after all the weather was ideal.

Etgar Keret's short short stories have irresistible first lines and this I think is a big part of the joy of reading him:

That night when the daemon came to take away his talent, he didn't whine or argue or put up a fuss. (From One Last story and That's It)

In Hell, they put me in a cauldron of boiling water. (From Katzenstein)

In June, after the plague of frogs, people began leaving the valley in droves. (From Plague of the Firstborn)

Dad wouldn't buy me a Bart Simpson doll. (Breaking the Pig)

If you want to waste some serious time here's a fun literary quiz about first lines, try this. (I scored 44 out of 66 which I don't think is too bad since most of it was guesswork!) And if you want even more, the American Book Review lists 100 Best First Lines from Novels here.

Bud Parr points out, this pondering on favourite first lines is more than a little dangerous:

I find myself thinking about the great books I've read, thumbing through them, trying to resist dropping everything to re-read them. Should I pop open a bottle of wine?

In my case I'm suddenly overcome with a terrible sadness for books once owned but lost along the way. Gaps in my collection that need to be filled.

Quirky Shorts

After reading that marathon of a Western and while slogging through the draft of a friend's novel, the book that is currently scratching my itch for a short and fun read is Etgar Keret's The Bus Driver Who Wanted To Be God and Other Stories which jumped into my hands the other day in Daunts.

Most of the stories are short-shorts, just a couple of pages long - snack length. Just right.

He reminds me so much of Murukami. His characters inhabit a universe where all the rules of nature can be broken - the inhabitants of hell are allowed out now and again for souvenir shopping in Uzbekistan, a man screams a wish into a hole in the wall and gains an angel for a friend, another makes a giant pipe into which he vanishes. (You can hear Etgar reading Pipes, here and there are plenty of other links to his work and downloadable stories on this site.)

Keret was born in 1967 and says his name translates as 'Urban challenge'. According to an interview in the Guardian, he began writing while in the Israeli Army where he wound up in an operation codenamed Quasimodo, working 48-hour shifts in front of a computer in an old underground atomic shelter.

He found in writing a way to release bits of himself that he denied and bottled up:

The reason I write is that I'm not in dialogue with my emotions; writing puts me in touch with myself.