First Line Friday!

There is simply no more influential component of a novel than the first line (other than the last line, but we’ll get to that in time). The first line is the writer’s declaration that the novel is in your hands, ready to be read, deemed to be important, and destined to alter your thinking. It's your first impression.

The first line of a novel is so embedded with purpose and prose that it leaves some writers seeming omnipotent, while it leaves others pleading for recognition.

With that being said, I hereby deem every Friday to be “First Line Friday” where we’ll look deep into my favorite first lines of all time.

Let’s start with perhaps the most powerful first line of a novel I have ever perused:

Over the weekend the vultures got into the presidential palace by pecking through the screens on the balcony windows 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.

Of course, that is Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s first sentence of The Autumn of the Patriarch. Hard to believe it’s the first sentence of a novel. The resonance of those phrases are astounding: “pecking through the screens” and “stirred up the stagnant time inside” and “city awoke out of its lethargy of centuries” and “the warm, soft breeze of a great man dead and rotting grandeur” all in the first sentence!

But that’s Gabriel Garcia Marquez for you. Genius.

First Line Friday: A Peek Into the Future

Back to our First Line Fridays series. We’ve covered setting, axioms and dialogue, now let’s take a peek into the future.

Sometimes the best way to kick off a novel is to come right out and hang the ending before the reader like a carrot before a horse. This doesn’t necessarily mean the story is spoiled, mind you, but when the reader is given  some sense of destination the immediate reaction tends to be “Whoa! Okay,  so that’s where we’re going? I’m game.” Here’s a perfect example, from Gabriel Garcia Marquez:

“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.” —from One Hundred Years of Solitude.

We covered another such first line not too long ago, by Jeffrey Eugenides:

“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.” — from Middlesex.

Here’s what I wrote about that line at the time, it applies just as well to the first example:

"I love how the author delivers the crux of the plot in the very first line. He’s still going to take us through the twists and turns of a novel-length work, the slow burn of details, the crescendo of backstories and present action. But right there in the first line, he stabs his finger at the map and shows us our destination. It has the effect of making you wonder ‘how the devil are we going to get from here to there?’ And I, for one, was sold on the story."

Here’s another one, from Robert Graves’  I, Claudius :

"I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles) who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as "Claudius the Idiot," or "That Claudius," or "Claudius the Stammerer," or "Clau-Clau-Claudius" or at best as "Poor Uncle Claudius," am now about to write this strange history of my life; starting from my earliest childhood and continuing year by year until I reach the fateful point of change where, some eight years ago, at the age of fifty-one, I suddenly found myself caught in what I may call the "golden predicament" from which I have never since become disentangled."

But sometimes all you have to do is hint at the ending. Others have handled the peek-into-the-future opening much more subtly. Take the first line of Dickens’s David Copperfield :

“Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.”

Or Paul Auster’s City of Glass:

“It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not."

In that example, we don’t even have the slightest idea what  “it” is that the wrong number started, but there’s a hint of the story and its ending in there that makes you want to learn more. Count me as a fan of the peek-into-the-future first line. 

First Line Friday!

I’ve felt stymied this week, bogged down, stuck in a rut. So, I’m putting a negative spin on this week’s “First Line Friday.” I want to showcase what, in my mind, is arguably one of the weakest, most ineffective first lines that I have ever read (for a critically acclaimed novel, at that!).

“See the boy.”

In case you missed it, that’s the first line: “See the boy.” That’s it. And guess who wrote it?

Cormac McCarthy in Blood Meridian, one of the richest, most insanely beautiful novels ever written. And yet, the first line is extremely lacking. It’s too plain, too Biblical, too meaningless. “See the boy.” Ok, I’ll see him. What’s the big deal? There is no implementation of any language that is intriguing in the least.

But I suppose that that's how life is sometimes . . . simply lacking.

In Colum McCann’s solid novel Let the Great World Spin, he states “good days, they come around the oddest corners.” Well, it’s the same with first lines. I fully expected Blood Meridian to have a drop-dead amazing first line. But it couldn’t be further from the truth.

But to be fair, the rest of Blood Meridian more than makes up for a blasé first line.

First Line Friday

If you review my previous First Line Friday posts, you may notice a pattern: I like short, zippy, poignant first lines.  So, in an effort to diversify my preferences, I'm going with a longer first line today:

"It was the summer of 1998 that my neighbor Coleman Silk - who, before retiring two years earlier, had been a classic professor at nearby Athena College for some twenty-odd years as well as serving for sixteen more as the dean of the faculty - confided to me that, at the age of seventy-one, he was having an affair with a thirty-four-year-old cleaning woman who worked down at the college."

That is what I would call an immense first line.  It provides a lot of information . . . a whole novel's worth in one sentence.  But, in spite of my preferences for short first lines, I have a certain appreciation for this first line. It seems to work.  It's somewhat burdensome, to be sure, but all in all, I can appreciate it.

Dost thou disagree?

First Line Friday!

It’s time for “First Line Friday” again!

So, turns out that perhaps the most buzzed novel of the last several years, Freedom by Jonathan Franzen, actually has a pretty stunning first line:

'The news about Walter Berglund wasn’t picked up locally - he and Patty had moved away to Washington two years earlier and meant nothing to St. Paul now - but the urban gentry of Ramsey Hill were not so loyal to their city as not to read the New York Times.'

Read it again slowly, as if it’s all you have to depict the purpose of the novel. Here is what I love about this first line:

• I love the name Walter Berglund. Not sure why. It’s cumbersome, to be sure, but it sticks. Walter Berglund. Sounds American. Sounds like a protagonist.
• I love how much this sentence says: There is a guy named Walter, he had a wife named Patty, they had lived in St. Paul, then moved to DC, and there is some unforeseen “news” that we’ll learn about later in the novel. It’s actually quite a lot of information for one line, but it’s smooth and eloquent. Not unruly or overly burdensome.
• I love the phrase “the urban gentry of Ramsey Hill.” The phrase so accurately depicts white people coasting through St. Paul in an Audi on their way to Starbucks prior to attending their daughter’s lacrosse game. It says all of that in 6 words: The Urban Gentry of Ramsey Hill. Love it.

As for the rest of the novel, I am still torn almost a year after reading it. It has glimpses of greatness, but also has lulls of meaningless. But that’s a topic for another post.

Just enjoy the first line today.

First Line Friday!

In the comments of our first movie-related post, Tucker asserts that there is no better lit-fic film adaptation than Robert Redford’s take on Norman Maclean’s novella A River Runs Through It. It is, as adaptations go, very true to the original. It helps that it was a short work to begin with, but even so, the film was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay in 1993. (And while it lost in that category, it did win best cinematography that year- it’s a gorgeous film.)

So let’s stack the first line of the book up against the first line of the movie, and see who comes out on top. Let’s let the original author, Mr. Maclean, kick things off:

“In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly-fishing.”

Right off the bat we see this is going to be a story about a family. Not only that, but a religious family. And then THWACK! He smacks us between the eyeballs with ‘fly-fishing.’

It’s hard to remember this now, but most people got their first introduction to fly-fishing in a movie theater in 1992. It’s one reason why a lot of fly-fishermen absolutely hate A River Runs Through It- the film had the adverse effect of crowding the best rivers in the West with legions of wannabe and novice fly-fishermen for the entire decade that followed. Anyway, after the reader asks themselves ‘what the devil is fly-fishing?’ they’re left to ponder the fact that whatever it is, in this book, and in this family, it’s been elevated to the status of religion. Very intriguing. Great first line. You can’t help but read on. Now for the movie:

“Long ago, when I was a young man, my father said to me... "Norman, you like to write stories." And I said, "Yes, I do." Then he said, "Someday, when you're ready... you might tell our family story. Only then will you understand what happened and why." In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly-fishing.

Now, somebody tell me, please, what was gained by lumping those four lackluster sentences in front of Maclean’s fantastic first line? 

Bupkis, that’s what.   Norman Maclean 1: Hollywood 0. But read/watch them both. You won’t regret it.

First Line Friday!

And, at long last, the first line of the week is as follows:

"A half hour after I came down here, the rains began."

Hmmm. Now, I'm indifferent to this first line. Clearly, it works. But I am not convinced as to how well it works. It's too bland for my taste, like it's missing an edge. And where is "here?" I think the writer would have done better to replace the word "here" with the actual location he is referencing: the toilet? his office? Baja Mexico? downtown? The first line deserves more specification.

So who wrote this mediocre first line? Wallace Stegner, in All The Little Live Things.

But, to be fair to Stegner, let's read the aforementioned first line with the whole first paragraph, and suddenly we have some serious prose:

"A half hour after I came down here, the rains began. They came without fuss, the thin edge of a circular Pacific storm that is probably dumping buckets on Oregon. One minute I was looking out my study window into the greeny-gold twilight under the live oak, watching a towhee kick up the leaves, and the next I saw that the air beyond the tree was scratched with fine rain. Now the flagstones are shining, the tops of the horizontal oak limbs are dark-wet, there is a growing drip from the dome of the tree above, the towhee's olive back has melted into umber dusk and gone. I sit here watching evening and the winter rains come on together, and I feel as slack and dull as the day or the season. Or not slack so much as bruised. I am like a man so stiff from a beating that every move reminds him and fills him with outrage."

Eh? Thoughts?

First Line Friday

Today, I am going to pull a classic first line from a classic book, and to do so, we're digging deeper into history than we ever have for First Line Friday . . . clear back to 1605 and Miguel De Cervantes' novel Don Quixote De La Mancha.

I've always loved this first line. It's timeless.  It's completely functional even 400 years later:

"En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme, no ha mucho tiempo que vivia un hidalgo do los de lanza en astillero, adarga antigua, rocin flaco y galgo corredor."

OR, in one of my preferred English translations:

"Domiciled in a village of La Mancha, the name of which I purposefully omit, there lived, not long ago, one of those gentlemen who usually keep a lance upon a rack, an old target, a lean horse, and a greyhound for coursing."

To me, the Spanish version is far superior to any English version which I have found.  The English versions seem burdened and lacking in flow.  But even in English, I have an affinity toward this first line that has survived centuries.

First Line Friday

Greetings all!

Today, I'd like to look at the mediocre first line of a tremendous novel. Your rebuttal is welcome, as always. Here is the first line:

"There is a lovely road that runs from Ixopo into the hills."

Fair enough . . . perhaps the road is lovely. But this first line just doesn't cut it for me. It offers nothing that is unique, intriguing, or edgy. Granted, it's simple, and there is beauty in simplicity, but . . .

The novel, of course, is Alan Paton's Cry, The Beloved Country. Now, go ahead.  Rebuttal?


*** MacEvoy weighs in ***


A lot of our email and RSS followers won't read the comments, but looking back through the introduction of my copy of C,TBC  I discovered a couple things that are interesting enough to tack on here. Consider this my rebuttal. 


Paton wrote this book while on an international tour of penal institutions. I'll quote the account of the genesis of this first line:

"He also took a side trip to Norway to visit Trondheim, and to see the locale of a Norwegian novel that interested him, Knut Hamsun's Growth of the Soil.  

Traversing the unfamiliar evergreen forests of the mountainous border landscape, Paton grew nostalgic for the hills of Natal... Jensen then brought Paton back to his hotel and promised to return in an hour to take him to dinner. In the course of that hour, moved, as he says, by powerful emotion, Paton wrote the lyric opening chapter beginning: "There is a lovely road that runs from Ixopo into the hills..." At that juncture he did not know what was to follow. He had sketched no scenario for a novel.

So he was moved by a memory of his homeland, and he poured that emotion into writing. My own opinion is that his emotion can easily be felt by the reader, especially as his first paragraph continues: 

"...These hills are grass-covered and rolling, and they are lovely beyond the singing of it. The road climbs seven miles into them, to Carisbrooke; and from there, if there is no mist, you look down on one of the fairest valleys of Africa."

But there's another reason I think it's a great opening line. The setting of South Africa, and the love of one's homeland are the major  themes of this novel. Read the passage we quoted in this post, for a taste of that. And here is Paton in his own words:

"So many things have been written about this book that I would not know how to add to them if I did not believe that I know best what kind of book it is. It is a song of love for one's far distant country, it is informed with longing for that land where they shall not hurt nor destroy in all that holy mountain, for that unattainable and ineffable land where there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, for the land cannot be again, of hills and grass and bracken, the land where you were born. It is a story of the beauty and terror of human life, and it cannot be written again because it cannot be felt again. Just how good it is, I do not know and I do not care. All I know is that it changed our lives. It opened the doors of the world to us, and we went through."

I think the simple opening line is the perfect way to launch that kind of book.

First Line Friday!

It's "First Line Friday" again. Today's first line is a great one for memorizing, if you are in the business of memorizing first lines:

"I knew her eight years ago."

Now, I like this line. I don't love it, but I do think it's a good first line. I like that it's concise (very concise . . . 6 words), but completely introduces the reader to the subject, which is obviously a girl. But, I also wonder about its efficacy? Does it work? Is too basic?

The writer, of course, is Phillip Roth. The novel is The Dying Animal.

First Line Friday!

Today's first line is from a novel I have never read, which was written by a writer that I once happened upon on a shockingly sunny evening in a Colorado library while I was supposed to be studying for the Colorado Bar Exam. I read the first line that evening, and oh how I wished I could have thrown down my legal books and read the damn Beckett novel. But no, my discipline got the best of me, and I stopped reading with this first and immortal line.

"The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new."

Ten words that convey a boat-load of tone! Just by reading this line, I can assume that the feeling of the novel will be bleak, monotonous, and somewhat cynical. Further, there are two images / phrases that I love in this brief line. First, the idea of the sun shining because it has no alternative? It's wonderfully jaded. Second, the sun shines on the "nothing new," a beautiful alternative to saying the "same old." I suppose that's why Beckett was a genius.

Perhaps someday I'll read something other than this first line.

First Line Friday!

This week, we are returning to a good first line, as opposed to a bad one. This week’s stellar first line is from a novel that is obviously a standout. It’s brief, just 14 words. But is says a lot . . . and that’s the sign of a good first line.

“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”

Why is this line so great? Simply because as you read it, everything flows nicely, until you slam your face into the last word. Thirteen? The clocks were striking thirteen?

That one profound word, “Thirteen,” immediately proposes to the reader that some sort of alternative reality is at hand. Why? Because we don’t have clocks that strike thirteen. It’s genius. One word throws us for an extreme loop. You are only 14 words into the novel, and you’ve already had to stop and reassess the reality of what you’re reading.

What novel is blessed with this first line?

Orwell’s 1984, of course.

First Line Friday

MacEvoy has been putting a bug in my ear as of late about The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides.  I haven't read it, but I did take a look at the first page earlier today.  As such, I figured we might as well examine its first line:

"To start with, look at all the books."

Hmmmmm.  I don't love it, to be honest.  It's too flippant.  Too brief.  Too colloquial for my taste.  MacEvoy may disagree . . .

(Side Note:  I am considering discontinuing First Line Friday to pursue other opportunities, such as "Title Tuesdays" or "Metaphor Mondays." What say all of you?  Are we tired of First Line Fridays?)

First Line Friday

Metafiction?

MacEvoy and I are both admitted suckers for Metafiction. So, when I recently came across today's first line, I was immediately sold on the premise of the entire novel (that's the beauty of a good first line). Now, I haven't actually read the novel yet, but it's waiting for me patiently on my shelf. Here is the first line:

"The first time that Jean-Claude Pelletier read Benno Von Archimboldi was Christmas 1980, in Paris, when he was nineteen years old and studying German literature. "

The novel is the critically acclaimed 2666 by Roberto Bolano. And Bolano's first line is packed with intrigue. Without having actually read the novel, I can assume that (i) Jean-Claude Pelletier is some sort of intellectual bibliophile, (ii) Archimboldi's writings are going to be central to Pelletier's core experience, and (iii) the setting is Europe. A beautiful literary recipe! Is it not?

Those of you who have actually read 2666 will please correct me if any of my assumptions are completely off-base.

First Line Friday

Today's first line is one that I've loved since the first day I read it, years ago, on my balcony in Los Angeles below the tapestry of a mild winter afternoon.

"I've been cordially invited to join the visceral realists."

This novel then goes on to tell the story of a 17 year old aspiring poet named Juan Garcia Madero in Mexico City and his interactions with a group of rogue poets known as, of course, the "visceral realists." This first line is very abrupt, not flowery, not overly burdensome, but concise, and then the real kicker: The Visceral Realists. The reader is 7 words into the novel and already wondering who the hell the visceral realists are. To my eyes, it's a very effective first line.

So who wrote this first line? And in what novel? Without further ado, it is Roberto Bolano's critically acclaimed "The Savage Detectives." This novel really frustrated me at times, while completely melting my face with its turns and prose at other times. I guess I'd suggest that you read it, but be advised that it's work. But it's work that's well worth it.

First Line Friday

As summer is directly upon us, today I am highlighting the first line of perhaps the greatest "summer novel" ever (in my humble opinion, at least).  It's a bit of an oddball novel, but I love it.  Here is the first line:

"It was a quiet morning, the town covered over with darkness and at ease in bed."

Recognize it?  Of course you don't because it's not that great of a first line.  Namely, "the town covered over with darkness and at ease in bed."  What?  Does anyone else think that phrase is awkward?  The town is at ease in bed?  Or did the writer forget a pronoun?  "The town covered with darkness and [Tucker] at ease in bed."  Either way, it sucks.  Sucky first line.  So let it be written.

What novel is this?

Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury.

But, I am actually quite fond of the second sentence:

"Summer gathered in the weather, the wind had the proper touch, the breathing of the world was long and warm and slow."

Love it.  The novel goes on to tell the story of the magic of a young boy's summer.  It's a simple concept, but amazingly poignant.  When you're a young boy, summer is magic. Simple as that.  No school, backyard soccer, marshmallows at dusk, bicycles and tents and sprinklers and popsicles and fences and skateboards and trees and footballs and freedom Freedom FREEDOM!

First Line Friday! Police Line-up

We’ve covered some amazing first lines and some others that tend to… fall flat. This raises some questions: Is a first line truly any different than any other line? Does a first line have  to knock you on your butt? Are the first lines of “great” books actually better than those of lesser books?

Let’s put that last question to the test. Our first lines today come to you courtesy of my phone’s camera, and the $0.50 romance bin at my local used bookstore. But here’s the catch. There are also two so-called “classics” mixed in for good measure. Without the crutch of your favorite search engine, can you pick the two classics out of the line-up? Just curious…

First Line Friday!

This week's first line is an interesting one to me. It's definitely not a line that I would write. The line doesn't introduce any characters, places, nor any sort of plot component. Instead, it stands alone as a simple expression of an idea, which is a fascinating way to commence a novel. Here is the first line:

"The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum!"

Obviously, this first line resides in Milan Kundera's famous novel, "The Unbearable Lightness of Being." What are your thoughts? Do you like it? Does it work?

First Line Friday: On the Road

It’s been a while since we’ve done one of these, but today’s first line is, in my opinion, kind of a stinker, even though it leads into one of my favorite books. The first two lines, as a matter of fact, are bits of back story we don’t really need, and that don’t figure in the rest of the novel. But that third line , now, that third line is great. If you ask me, it is the rightful heir to the first line throne. And if I were Kerouac’s editor, I would have lopped off the first two and made that one my opener:

“I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up. I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won’t bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with the miserably weary split-up and my feeling that everything was dead. With the coming of Dean Moriarty began the part of my life you could call my life on the road. Before that I’d often dreamed of going West to see the country, always vaguely planning and never taking off.”

What do you think? Am I off here? Of course I'm not...

First Line Friday!

"Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure."

That’s how this famous first line appears in the original French. It’s a line that has been translated a number of different ways throughout the years:

"For a long time I used to go to bed early."  (C. K. Scott Moncrieff)

"For a long time I would go to bed early."  (D J Enright) 

"For a long time, I went to bed early."  (Lydia Davis)

Then again, it’s from a book whose translated title is still the subject of some debate. It’s an interesting first line, in that it serves as the opening salvo for the novel Swann’s Way, as well as the introduction to Proust’s seven-volume masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time (or Remembrance of Things Past, if you prefer that title).  

In either case, it’s a deceptively short and straightforward opening into a work whose later sentences can seem like veritable labyrinths to an overwhelmed reader. You’ll feel like a world-class hurdler as you learn to work your way over dependent clause after dependant clause, keeping your eye on the subject and racing in search of its main predicate ten lines down the page. Frankly, it’s a bit of a mess before you get used to it.

Still, I don’t know if I’ve read many books that reached me on quite so deep a level, or many authors who are quite so precise or so thorough in getting their meanings across. And I think the extremely personal nature of the prose starts in that very first line.

Anyone read it? Did you like it? Hate it? Toss it of with ambivalence? I’d be interested to hear.