Literature's greatest opening paragraphs

[jochen stremmel]

One of my all-time-favourites:

The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in
the morning.

(The first line of a first novel.)

Or that one:

A telephone-bell rang in darkness.


2012/9/1 Rich Clavey <antizoyd at yahoo.com>:
>
> One of my favourite first lines:
>
> 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
> z.
>
> http://www.macclaveyphotography.com/
>
>
> --- On Thu, 8/30/12, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
>> Subject: Re: Literature's greatest opening paragraphs
>> To: "pynchon -l" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>> Date: Thursday, August 30, 2012, 10:33 PM
>> in his _how to read novels like a
>> professor_, foster includes one
>> chapter on why novels have fist pages, pick-up lines and
>> opening
>> seductions...and he talks about how the opening is a form of
>> seduction
>> and a contract and also a lesson in how to read the rest of
>> the work.
>> McHale provides an excellent analyis of how the opening of
>> GR teaches
>> the reader how to read the rest of the book. Agree or
>> disagree with
>> his analysis, but ity is difficult to disagree with the idea
>> that the
>> opening is worth a very close examination. In fact, this is
>> the case
>> with most works, when we turn to the opening after reading
>> the work
>> weoften  discover what has been packed into the
>> powerful opening.
>> Foreshadowing is difficult to see clearly the first go roud
>> and
>> returning to the opening we often discover this subtle
>> technique.
>>
>>
>> In any event, foster provides a nice list of things the
>> opening of a
>> work can establish: style,  tone, mood, diction, pov,
>> narrative
>> presence and attitude, time frame and management, place,
>> motif, theme,
>> irony, rhythm, pace expectations, character, instruction in
>> how to
>> read the novel.
>>