Yeh, The Crow Road. I met him once working a book signing. He was brilliant, incredibly down to earth, very very funny and an all round good bloke. His books have kept me enthralled, especially Dead Air and Complicity. Helluva read.
"On our wedding day I was forty-six, she was eighteen. Now, I know what you are thinking: older man (not thin, somewhat bald, lame in one leg, teeth of wood) exercises the marital prerogative, thereby mortifying the poor young—
But that is false."
“Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics.”
And for a long time you'll be reading the rest of the book!
I started reading it in jail, after reading 1Q84 which had a line stating that the only place you'll ever get enough time to read that book is in prison.
I am reminded of the first sentence of The Postman Always Rings Twice, something like "They threw me off the hay truck about noon." I suppose this is because it was somewhere out in southeastern California also.
We read fear and loathing to each other in a tent hunkered down in a 48hr long storm in Iceland. I don't think I've laughed as hard since. What a blinder of a novel.
I'm not sure that's true. Certainly there are a number of "classics," including some like A Tale of Two Cities that are probably not the author's best work, which most people would probably find boring with memorable openings.
LIFE IN this society being, at best, an utter bore
and no aspect of society being at all relevant to
women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible,
thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the
government, eliminate the money system, institute
complete automation and destroy the male sex.
Valerie Solanas' The SCUM Manifesto has a great opening, and tbf sustains the pace and spice for a few pages, but subsequently becomes almost unreadable.
How many examples of a great opening line with a dismal rest-of-the-story do you have? To me, the great opening line is a microcosm of the great story: the tension between setup and punchline, between conflict and resolution, between mystery and revelation, and so on. The alchemy of storytelling is for an author to maintain that seemingly gravitational pull of the audience being inexorably hungry for the next answer without ever making it feel cheap. By extension, the ideal master of the craft can crystalize that dynamic at precisely the points that matter, and thereby make a space to play with such luxuries as theme and characterization and metaphor and parable in the rest.
While I'm sure that one could find plenty of counter-examples if they tried, I did indeed flip through my (quite few) two-starred books on GoodReads, read their opening sentences, and found that each one was a clunker. So I think you make a good point.
Actually, I wonder if I could accurately guess my own ratings by how much I liked the first line.
Unforgettable, brilliant. (Find the original large-format hardback, not the paperback re-issue that can't possibly recapture the exuberant pictures spread across the pages.)
(I guess you may have been thinking of a different book...?)
The opening line and following run-on sentence has acquired a bit of a cult following and inspired a contest for best worst fictional opening: https://www.bulwer-lytton.com/
It's possible the author you linked was inspired by this as well.
> It's possible the author you linked was inspired by this as well.
More than possible; I'm pretty sure it's deliberate. They like to take well-known, even clichéd, elements and re-imagine them in new and creative ways.
I loved the first three books when I read them back in the early nineties but The Gunslinger is my favourite of the series. It had a certain poetic beauty and mysterious quality to it that was unlike any other Stephen King book that I had read before – or since.
I'm glad this essay mentioned the opening line of 1984. It's one of my favorites: "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen."
I looked up some of the author's writings. She had an interesting opening line in one of her short stories, entitled "Endangered":[1]
He continues the grand tradition of science fiction writers producing works of conceptual genius marred only by insipid characters lacking any development and absent plots.
The first half of this book was absolutely amazing... Could have been one of the best sci-fi books ever, but the second half was mediocre and unconvincing... Such a disappointment. Still worth it though overall.
On an exceptionally hot evening early in July a young man came out of the garret in which he lodged in S. Place and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, towards K. bridge.
"In the beginning, the world was created. This made a lot of people angry, and has been widely regarded as a bad move." (OK, that's two sentences. So sue me.)
"There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it."
Hah! I'm an Ellis fan, or at least a fan of his Comic Books (or are they Graphical Novels, I never learn), but I didn't really get along with Crooked Little Vein. I honestly don't remember a single piece of the plot (it's 15-ish years since I read it), but I do remember that I got the feeling that his main objective was to gross me out. A bit like Garth Ennis, but it novel format. I get a bit annoyed when (it's a bit too obvious that) the author's main objective is to play his audience rather than to tell a story.
All of Catch-22 is full of brilliant lines like this, and littered with absurdist comedy gems. Curious how it turns into such a horribly depressing story by the end.
Reminded me of: I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed. What you will hear, then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have.
Since 1982 the Bulwer Lytton Fiction Contest has challenged participants to write an atrocious opening sentence to the worst novel never written. The whimsical literary competition honors Sir Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, whose 1830 novel Paul Clifford begins with “It was a dark and stormy night.”
Second sentence: "Suddenly a shot rang out." Which explains my (never actually submitted) entry:
"He was a dork, and Stormy Knight suddenly shot the ring right out of his fingers, because she was tired of dorks, and especially the kind of dork who would presume that she would marry him, even though he was a dork and she was the kind of girl who could shoot a ring right out of a man's hand, hitting nothing but the ring and a few miscellaneous bits of fingertip."
Wow, that is attrocious. I kept getting bored part way through and had to force myself to go back and try again. Now I've reached semantic saturation on the word dork.
201 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 227 ms ] thread-- Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu.
* For a long time, I would go to bed early.
I started reading it in jail, after reading 1Q84 which had a line stating that the only place you'll ever get enough time to read that book is in prison.
“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
That masterpiece took me a long time to digest and did indeed change me.
Actually, I wonder if I could accurately guess my own ratings by how much I liked the first line.
A perfect opening line. Followed by a long paragraph beating the same topic to death. And who remembers the rest-of-the-story.
Unforgettable, brilliant. (Find the original large-format hardback, not the paperback re-issue that can't possibly recapture the exuberant pictures spread across the pages.)
(I guess you may have been thinking of a different book...?)
The opening line and following run-on sentence has acquired a bit of a cult following and inspired a contest for best worst fictional opening: https://www.bulwer-lytton.com/
It's possible the author you linked was inspired by this as well.
More than possible; I'm pretty sure it's deliberate. They like to take well-known, even clichéd, elements and re-imagine them in new and creative ways.
Stephen King has written about how the Dark Tower was written, and it came from the opening line.
A great opening line is an inspiration for the rest of the story, it sets the scene.
I looked up some of the author's writings. She had an interesting opening line in one of her short stories, entitled "Endangered":[1]
"The artists were kept in cages."
[1] https://americanshortfiction.org/endangered
I think Seveneves was one of Stephenson's weaker novels overall, but you can't deny it has a killer opening line.
"There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it."
Nine Princes in Amber, Roger Zelazny
https://www.bulwer-lytton.com
Alvin Lucier - I Am Sitting in a Room https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhtO4DsSazc
the Compiler. Opening this Summer, 2022.
Since 1982 the Bulwer Lytton Fiction Contest has challenged participants to write an atrocious opening sentence to the worst novel never written. The whimsical literary competition honors Sir Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, whose 1830 novel Paul Clifford begins with “It was a dark and stormy night.”
"He was a dork, and Stormy Knight suddenly shot the ring right out of his fingers, because she was tired of dorks, and especially the kind of dork who would presume that she would marry him, even though he was a dork and she was the kind of girl who could shoot a ring right out of a man's hand, hitting nothing but the ring and a few miscellaneous bits of fingertip."
Well done!
http://adamcadre.ac/lyttle.html