The Best First Sentence in Fiction
Written byPosted on January 30, 2006
Filed Under Literary Motifs
Scott and I recently had a conversation about how important opening sentences are to narrative. But I’d like to take this one step further and dare you all to come up with the best first sentence in a short story or a novel that you’ve ever read. We’re talking 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!
Here’s my nominee:
“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.” — Anthony Burgess, Earthly Powers
And yours?
[UPDATE: Totally unrelated to the collaborative little quest here, Wendi is kind enough to point to Litline, the top 100 first sentences in fiction, which apparently was located by those swinging cats over at LHB.]
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Probably not the best, but an old favorite of mine…
“In walks these girls in nothing but bathing suits.” — John Updike, “A&P”
“The hull of the submarine was lashed to the huge pilings, a behemoth strapped in silhoutte, the sweeping lines of its bow arcing into the light of the North Sea dawn”. The Holcroft Covenant
Robert Ludlum
of course my other choice is a wee bit biased
“The afternoon sun baked down on Yemen’s port city of Oman, as twenty-four men gathered in a traditional ceremonial tent”.
Sand Storm-Steve Clackson
The first one that came to mind:
“The problem is credibility.”–Ron Carlson, “Bigfoot Stole My Wife”
“I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.” - Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle
not sure if this counts, but “Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.”
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
Berube did this not long ago. I chimed in.
http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php/weblog/arbitrary_fun/
But I changed my mind. Now this is the one I’d choose:
“S. Levin, formerly a drunkard, after a long and tiring transcontinental journey, got off the train at Marathon, Cascadia, towards evening of the last Sunday in August, 1950.”
- Bernard Malamud, A New Life.
Is it wrong to suggest:
“A screaming comes across the sky.”
- Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
I have every reason to think that Flann O’Brien must start out The Third Policeman with something eye-opening, but I can’t find my copy, blast it.
That said, The Bell Jar starts out with an arresting one:
“It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.”
but there’s much to be said for this, from Woolf’s Orlando:
“He — for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it — was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which hung from the rafters.”
Yes, I think that’s better. But in surveying the shelves I was also was reminded to check out Moll Flanders, and was not disappointed:
“My True Name is so well known in the Records, or Registers at Newgate, and in the Old-Baily, and there are some things of such Consequence still depending there, relating to my particular Conduct, that it is not to be expected I should set my Name, or the Account of my Family to this Work; perhaps, after my Death it may be better known; at present it would not be proper, no, not tho’ a general Pardon should be issued, even without Exceptions and reserve of Persons or Crimes.”
Perhaps not as pithy as some of the other suggestions, but you have to give it up to Defoe for giving us a great narrator in a nutshell, right there.
“The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.”
Vladimir Nabokov, Speak Memory
Uhm…this week….it’s the opening sentence of All This Heavenly Glory, truth be told.
I’d like to contribute Nabokov’s ‘Laughter in the dark’ first sentence, although it is a paragraph. But, then it is the best first paragraph of a book ever written:
“Once upon a time there lived in Berlin, Germany, a man called Albinus. He was rich, respectable, happy; one day he abandoned his wife for the sake of a youthful mistress; he loved; was not loved; and his life ended in disaster.”
Two things:
a) One that hasn’t been mentioned: Denis Johnson, “Jesus’ Son.” “A salesman who shared his liquor and steered while sleeping…A Cherokee filled with burbon…A VW no more than a bubble of hashish fumes, captained by a college student…
b) that list has the first line of “Pale Fire” wrong. That is the first line of the poem inside. The novel begins with the forward by Kinbote.
“The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.” (two sentences) - The Go-Between, L.P. Hartley
Almost any line beginning a Dick Francis novel: Twice Shy, “I told the boys to stay quiet while I went to fetch my gun”; Reflex, “Winded and coughing, I lay on one elbow and spat out a mouthful of grass and mud”; Bonecrack “They both wore thin rubber masks”; Break In“Blood ties can mean trouble, chains and fatal obligation”; Trial Run, “I could think of three good reasons for not going to Moscow, one of which was twenty-six, blond, and upstairs unpacking her suitcase”; Straight, “I inherited my brother’s life”; Shattered,”Four of us drove together to Cheltenham races on the day that Martin Stukely died there from a fall in a steeplechase”; and two that I genuinely like, Decider, “OK, So here I am, Lee Morris, opening doors and windows to gusts of life and early death”, and Come To Grief, “I had this friend, you see, that everyone loved”.
The opening line of Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle draws me in immediately: “I planned my death carefully; unlike my life, which meandered along from one thing to another, despite my
feeble attempts to control it.”
Another that works for me is this one from James Kelman’s How late it was, how late: “Ye wake in a corner and stay there hoping yer body will disappear, the thoughts smothering ye; these thoughts; but ye want to remember and face up to things, just something keeps ye from doing it, why can ye no do it; the words filling yer head: then the other words; there’s something wrong; there’s something far far wrong; ye’re no a good man, ye’re just no a good man.”
This is from Terry Gamble’s Good Family:
“In the years before our grandmother died, when my sister and I wore matching dresses, and the grown-ups, unburdened by conscience, drank gin and smoked; those years before planes made a mockery of distance, and physics a mockery of time; in the years before I knew what it was like to be regarded with hard, needy want, when my family still had its goodness, and I my innocence; in those years before Negroes were blacks, and soldiers went AWOL, and women were given their constrained, abridged liberties, we traveled to Michigan by train.”
“Even Camilla had enjoyed masquerades, of the safe sort where the mask may be dropped at that critical moment it presumes itself as reality.”
- William Gaddis, The Recognitions
The most memorable first line, in the sense that I actually remember it without having to look it up, from a book I actually read (as opposed to some of the classics I think I read) in recent years:
The telephone rang, and she knew she was going to die.
— Arturo Perez-Reverte, The Queen of the South
I’d go for… As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.
Or…I remember the whole beginning as a succession of flights and drops, a little seesaw of the right throbs and the wrong.
terse, intriguing& shocking when it opened Last Exit To Brooklyn back in the 60,s, this five word sentence still grabs you…..”GEORGETTE WAS A HIP QUEER”
Technically it’s two sentences, but…
“Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfasionable end of the western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is a utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.”
~Douglas Adams: The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
A little surprised no one has mentioned them, perhaps because they’re so obvious but special mention must always be given to Slaughterhouse Five’s “Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time” (technically not the first sentence I guess, but cited as such by Vonnegut himself). Melville’s “Call me Ishmael” will always be a classic, as will Chuck Dicken’s “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way- in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being recieved, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”
Ponder that for a while. I know I will.
Here’s a good first line, especially considering the title of the piece:
“This is true.”
–Tim O’Brien, How to Tell a True War Story
When Keri Hart came face-to-face with love, not even her high-society mother’s wishes for her to “marry up, never down, and God forbid a Yankee” could change the way she felt about Ryan Mitchell.
The best? But of course!
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a man in posession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
It was to be this:
“As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me”. George Orwell, England your England
This one is mine;
“My freinds who know me well have become accustomed to strange things happening to me. However, there are some occasions which are so unusual that they leave even them,shaking their heads in desbelief and wondering how I get myself into such predicaments.”
Just Ian
An Anthology Of Autobiographical Anecdotes
(it opened all 13 chapters)
Dodie Smith- I capture the castle:
“I write this sitting in the kitchen sink”
or
Daphne Du Maurier- Rebecca
“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderly again”