“124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom.”
What an incredible book this is. Encouraged by Oprah Winfrey I picked it up and was utterly hooked by that first line. What is 124? I assumed it was a house number, but how could a house be spiteful? Equally we don’t equate babies with venom, venom causes death not life. Straight away we know something is very wrong with this household. Does Beloved take a bodily form because of that venom? Does she want revenge? I choose to think she’s a physical manifestation of Sethe’s guilt and grief, but also a reminder that slavery casts a very long shadow.
“Watch your step. Keep your wits about you; you will need them. This city I am bringing you to is vast and intricate, and you have not been here before. You may imagine, from other stories you’ve read, that you know it well, but those stories flattered you, welcoming you as a friend, treating you as if you belonged.”
I love narrators that address me directly and here the lines make me smile. It feels like someone is trying to beguile me. Sugar- a 19 year old prostitute tells us that all the novels we’ve read about Victorian London don’t depict the truth. In fact they mislead us. We think we’re visiting an age of propriety where an ankle can’t be shown. Sugar will show us the unvarnished truth and we can’t resist following.
“The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.”
My first introduction to this book was through the 1970s film, shown to me by my mum. I read all of L.P. Hartley’s books from there, but I don’t think I ever forgot Julie Christie and that hot, humid summer. That slow build of tension.This is such a brilliant opening line that they are the first words we hear in the film adaptation. This book is about loss of innocence and how rigid social structures cause emotional damage. Again, that damage is passed down the generations. As a lover of historical fiction this line offers a doorway into the past and I’m always keen to step through.
“There was someone in the house.”
This is a very recent addition to my list, but it’s a deceptively simple line that touches something primal in us. Many people have the dream that there’s an intruder in their home. This line sends a chill through the reader, the one that happens when we hear a strange noise in the night. Is that the cat? Did we lock the back door? I defy anyone to put the book down after reading that line, because you just have to find out what happens next, not exactly sure whether what we’re reading is real or a dream.
“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.”
What an opener! The author gives us everything – where we are, a time and the most unexpected aspect of our narrator’s life. Yet we immediately want to know more. Calliope was once identified as a girl, but he was always sure he was a boy. Can there be anything left to tell us? It turns out that this is perhaps the least extraordinary part of the tale. We then go back a few generations to to an embattled Greece and Turkey for a family secret that may explain Cal’s existence.
“I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. That is, my feet are in it; the rest of me is on the draining-board, which I have padded with our dog’s blanket and the tea-cosy.”
This is Cassandra Mortmain’s story and the first thing we learn is that writing is important to her and she lives somewhere where it’s hard to find a suitable and comfortable position to do it. This is largely due to her untidy, bohemian family and the damp, tumbledown castle they live in. It’s a great opener that makes you want to discover why Cassandra is forced to the sink and what the rest of the family are like – including a step-mother who has a penchant for random nudity. I have a tote bag with this quote on because I love it so much.
“My trial starts the way my life did: a squall of elbows and shoving and spit.”
This is an interesting opener that, like others here, plays with the famous classic Victorian opening of David Copperfield by Charles Dickins. David’s story is chronological and opens with his birth, though he concedes he doesn’t actually remember it. This shows birth is more brutal and bloody than that, in fact it feels like a fight. What sort of woman comes in to the world like this? More to the point, who would tell their child such a graphic tale of their birth? It makes the reader want to find out, because surely this girl is a scrappy little survivor.
“What’s it going to be then, eh?’ That was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry.”
I probably wouldn’t ever have read A Clockwork Orange but I was in love with my friend Elliot and he’d just finished it. He offered it and I thought we could talk about it afterwards so I took it. I read these first lines and wondered what the hell sort of world this was, but my second thought was what sort of incredible imagination came up with this? It’s confronting, confusing and absolutely brilliant.
“So now get up.” Felled, dazed, silent, he has fallen; knocked full length on the cobbles of the yard. His head turns sideways; his eyes are turned toward the gate, as if someone might arrive to help him out. One blow, properly placed, could kill him now.”
Hilary Mantel does an amazing thing with this novel – she takes a historical figure we know well and possibly dislike, but somehow makes us want to know his story. This sudden, violent opener elicits sympathy from the reader. It’s a brutal start, the thought of hitting a cobbled yard with such force made me wince. Why has he been assaulted and by who? She hooks us in and makes us realise that everyone has a varied and complicated story. That we can feel empathy for someone we don’t like very much.
“An icy rush of air, a freezing slipstream on the newly exposed skin. She is, with no warning, outside the inside and the familiar wet, tropical world has suddenly evaporated. Exposed to the elements. A prawn peeled, a nut shelled.
No breath. All the world come down to this. One breath.”
Another first few lines that bring back David Copperfield for me. One of the issues is that David narrates his own birth, when he couldn’t possibly have known what happened. This birth is not narrated by the baby. but narrates how the baby might feel and understand coming into the world. The distinction of outside and inside, the cold and the description of a peeled prawn immediately evoke fragility and vulnerability. The world is hostile in the first minutes of baby Ursula’s life and we want to protect her and see her grow.
The Lotus Readers 