First sentences

There's a running joke among English professors, of the (hypothetical!) class you have not only not prepared for, you haven't even read the text in question. The solution? "We can learn a lot from a close reading of this novel's opening paragraph ..."

All joking aside though, I do rather love looking at opening sentences. In my first-year course this week, that's what we're doing -- looking at a selection of opening passages from a variety of novels and considering how the tone and voice set the stage for the story to come.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a master of the opening sentence:

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

--One Hundred Years of Solitude

"On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming on."

--Chronicle of a Death Foretold

"Over the weekend the vultures got into the presidential palace by pecking through screens on the balcony and the flapping of their wings stirred up the stagnant time inside, and at dawn on Monday the city awoke out of its lethargy of centuries with the warm, soft breeze of a great man dead and rotting grandeur."

--The Autumn of the Patriarch

A great opening sentence is one you can roll over in your mouth like a slowly melting candy. They are even better upon returning to them after having read the book in question: seeing the groundwork they lay, appreciating what the author is doing right out of the gate. Some of my favourites:

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

--Don DeLillo, Underworld

"With a single drop of ink for a mirror, the Egyptian sorcerer undertakes to reveal to any chance comer far–reaching visions of the past."

--George Eliot, Adam Bede

"You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler."

--Italo Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveler

"One summer afternoon Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job sorting it out more than honorary."

--Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

Then of course, there are the classics:

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."

--Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

"Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo."

--James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

"Call me Ishmael."

--Herman Melville, Moby Dick

Or the simple and chilling:

"They shoot the white girl first."

--Toni Morrison, Paradise

Or the comical:

"Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes' chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into a privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant an preoccupied expression."

--Flann O'Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds

"I was never so amazed in my life as when the Sniffer drew his concealed weapon from its case and struck me to the ground, stone dead."

--Robertson Davies, Murther and Walking Spirits

OK, enough. I could do this all day -- how geeky is that?