This is a great opening... (writing)

[Exposer]

The opening paragraphs of Hemingway's OLD MAN AND THE SEA.

He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. In the first forty days a boy had been with him. But after forty days without a fish the boy’s parents had told him that the old man was now definitely and finally salao, which is the worst form of unlucky, and the boy had gone at their orders in another boat which caught three good fish the first week. It made the boy sad to see the old man come in each day with his skiff empty and he always went down to help him carry either the coiled lines or the gaff and harpoon and the sail that was furled around the mast. The sail was patched with flour sacks and, furled, it looked like the flag of permanent defeat.

The old man was thin and gaunt with deep wrinkles in the back of his neck. The brown blotches of the benevolent skin cancer the sun brings from its reflection on the tropic sea were on his cheeks. The blotches ran well down the sides of his face and his hands had the deep-creased scars from handling heavy fish on the cords. But none of these scars were fresh. They were as old as erosions in a fishless desert.

Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same color as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated.

“Santiago,” the boy said to him as they climbed the bank from where the skiff was hauled up. “I could go with you again. We’ve made some money.”

The old man had taught the boy to fish and the boy loved him.

“No,” the old man said. “You’re with a lucky boat. Stay with them.”

“But remember how you went eighty-seven days without fish and then we caught big ones every day for three weeks.”

“I remember,” the old man said. “I know you did not leave me because you doubted.”

“It was papa made me leave. I am a boy and I must obey him.”

“I know,” the old man said. “It is quite normal.”

“He hasn’t much faith.”

“No,” the old man said. “But we have. Haven’t we?”

“Yes,” the boy said. “Can I offer you a beer on the Terrace and then we’ll take the stuff home.”

“Why not?” the old man said. “Between fishermen.”

Now THAT is good writing.

 

[Gregory]

It's okay. I've read better.

 

[Mr Manifesto]

My butt was hairy. It had many hairs on it. After forty days, the hairs were still there. They did not go away.

I mean, what is it with Hemingway, anyway? The only thing you can say about him is that he took the 'most overrated author' mantle off Jane Austen.

 

[Gregory]

Hey, Jane Austen was an excellent author. Pride and Prejudice is probably the best "classic" book I've read.

 

[Exposer]

Well, beauty is in the eye of the beholder I guess.

 

[shemp]

My butt was hairy. It had many hairs on it. After forty days, the hairs were still there. They did not go away.

PLAGIARIST!!!

 

[Peter Jenkins]

Sometimes you just read a sentence or two from a book and decide you have to read the whole book.

Sorry, but that passage wouldn't persuade me to read the rest of the page.

P

 

[Brian]

From: For Whom the Bell Tolls...
"Living was a hawk in the sky. Living was an earthen jar of water in the dust of the threshing with the grain flailed out and the chaff blowing. Living was a horse between your legs and a carbine under one leg and a hill and a valley and a stream with trees along it and the far side of the valley and the hills beyond."

 

[Timble]

One of my favorites: 1984 George Orwell.

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.

The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it a coloured poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features. Winston made for the stairs. It was no use trying the lift. Even at the best of times it was seldom working, and at present the electric current was cut off during daylight hours. It was part of the economy drive in preparation for Hate Week. The flat was seven flights up, and Winston, who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went slowly, resting several times on the way. On each landing, opposite the lift-shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.

Disorientates you in the first sentence and tells you everything you need to know about the kind of world Winston Smith lives in, in two paragraphs.

 

[FIfteen Iguana]

Riddley Walker, by Russell Hoban:

"On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the last wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen. He dint make the groun shake nor nothin like that when he come onto my spear he werent all that big plus he lookit poorly. He don the reqwyrt he ternt and stood and clatterd his teef and made his rush and there we wer then. Him on 1 end of the spear kicking his life out and me on the other end watching him dy. I said, 'Your tern now my tern later.'"

Nerve, by Dick Francis:

"Art Matthews shot himself, loudly and messily, in the center of the parade ring at Dunstable races."

Fat Tuesday, by Earl Emerson:

"I was trapped in a house with a lawyer, a bare-breasted woman, and a dea man. The rattlesnake in the paper sack only complimated matters."

BLack Hearts and Slow Dancing, also by Earl Emerson:
"Fontana liked to think he wasn't a murderer." (Note: Fontana is the hero.)

The Pusher, by Ed McBain:

"Winter came in like an anarchist with a bomb."

Almost any of Richard Stark's novels about Parker, for example, from Firebreak:

"When the phone rang, Parker was in the garage, killing a man."

 

[Yahweh]

There is a reason why its a classic...

F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby:

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.

"Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."

 

[Exposer]

I always pick up books at the bookstore and read the first sentence. If it's not good, I set the book down at once.

Here is another of my favorite openings...

Chronicle of a Death Foretold

by Gabriel García Márquez


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. He'd dreamed he was going through a grove of timber trees where a gentle drizzle was falling, and for an instant he was happy in his dream, but when he awoke he felt completely spattered with bird ◊◊◊◊. "He was always dreaming about trees," Plácida Linero, his mother, told me twenty-seven years later, recalling the details of that distressing Monday. "The week before, he'd dreamed that he was alone in a tinfoil airplane and flying through the almond trees without bumping into anything," she said to me. She had a well-earned reputation as an accurate interpreter of other people's dreams, provided they were told her before eating, but she hadn't noticed any ominous augury in those two dreams of her son's, or in the other dreams of trees he'd described to her on the mornings preceding his death.

 

[JesFine]

Riddley Walker, by Russell Hoban:

"On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the last wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen. He dint make the groun shake nor nothin like that when he come onto my spear he werent all that big plus he lookit poorly. He don the reqwyrt he ternt and stood and clatterd his teef and made his rush and there we wer then. Him on 1 end of the spear kicking his life out and me on the other end watching him dy. I said, 'Your tern now my tern later.'"

Great book.

The only opening I know off the top of my head is from Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow

A screaming comes across the sky.

It is quite an example of packing an obscene amount of imagery and symbolism into a tiny space.

 

[Aracan]

The Man Without Qualities
by Robert Musil

There was a depression over the Atlantic. It was travelling eastwards, towards an area of high pressure over Russia and still showed no tendency to move northward around it. The isotherms and isotheres were fulfilling their functions. The atmospheric temperature was in proper relation to the average annual temperature, the temperature of the coldest as well as of the hottest month, and the aperiodic monthly variation in temperature. The rising and setting of the sun and of the moon, the phases of the moon, Venus and Saturn’s rings, and many other important phenomena, were in accordance with the forecasts in the astronomical yearbooks. The vapor in the air was at its highest tension, and the moisture in the air was at its lowest. In short, to use an expression that describes the fact pretty satisfactorily, even though it is somewhat old-fashioned: it was a fine August day in the year 1913.

(one of the more famous incipit in germanophone literature).

 

[Floyt]

The only opening I know off the top of my head is from Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's RainbowIt is quite an example of packing an obscene amount of imagery and symbolism into a tiny space.

Thomas Pynchon is on my To-Read-List since I saw the blurb on Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash": "Like a Thomas Pynchon novel wth the brakes removed!"

This is the beginning of "Snow Crash", talk about graphic descriptions... I WOULD like to read more in that vein!

SNOW CRASH
by Neal Stephenson


The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallowed subcategory. He's got esprit up to here. Right now, he is preparing to carry out his third mission of the night. His uniform is black as activated charcoal, filtering the very light out of the air. A bullet will bounce off its arachnofiber weave like a wren hitting a patio door, but excess perspiration wafts through it like a breeze through a freshly napalmed forest. Where his body has bony extremities, the suit has sintered armorgel: feels like gritty jello, protects like a stack of telephone books.

and half a page or so later...

The Deliverator's car has enough potential energy packed into its batteries to fire a pound of bacon into the Asteroid Belt. Unlike a bimbo box or a Burb beater, the Deliverator's car unloads that power through gaping, gleaming, polished sphincters. When the Deliverator puts the hammer down, ◊◊◊◊ happens. You want to talk contact patches? Your car's tires have tiny contact patches, talk to the asphalt in four places the size of your tongue. The Deliverator's car has big sticky tires with contact patches the size of a fat lady's thighs. The Deliverator is in touch with the road, starts like a bad day, stops on a peseta.

All this about, literally, a pizza delivery guy

 

[Hexxenhammer]

Yes, Snow Crash's beginning is one of the best.

Movies
Music
Microcode (software)
Highspeed pizza delivery

OTOH, this thread should have tipped me off that Exposer was GP. Classic GP, but without the pictures.

 

[JesFine]

Thomas Pynchon is on my To-Read-List since I saw the blurb on Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash": "Like a Thomas Pynchon novel wth the brakes removed!"

This is the beginning of "Snow Crash", talk about graphic descriptions... I WOULD like to read more in that vein!

...And now Snow Crash is on my To-Read-List... thanks Floyt!

 

[Nigel]

The Hustler by Walter Tevis:

Henry, black and stooped, unlocked the door with a key on a large metal ring. He had just come up in the elevator. It was nine o'clock in the morning. The door was a massive thing, a great ornate slab of oak, stained once to look like mahogany, ebony now from sixty years of smoke and dirt. He pushed the door open, shoved the door stop in place with his lame foot, and limped in.

There was no need to turn the lights on, for in the morning the three huge windows along the side wall faced the rising sun. Outside of them was much daylight, much of downtown Chicago. Henry pulled the cord that parted the heavy draperies and these gathered in grimy elegance to the edges of the windows. Outside was a panorama of gray buildings; between them, patches of a virginal blue sky. Then he opened the windows, a few inches from the bottom. Air puffed abruptly and small eddies of dust and the aftermaths of four-hour-old cigarette smoke whirled and then began to dissipate. Always by afternoon the draperies would be drawn tight, the windows shut; only in the morning was the tobaccoed air exchanged for fresh.

I like this book!

 

[roger]

I truly, truly love the writing in Robert Penn Warren's book All the King's Men, and have always loved the opening. I was going to quote it here, but given that the book is set in the American South in the early part of the 20th century, the protaganist uses some racist terms. I don't have a problem with time and place appropriate language and thought, but some do. Perhaps I'll just quote up to that point, and interested people can go to amazon to see the rest, if they like.

MASON CITY.

To get there you follow Highway 58, going northeast out fo the city, and it is a good highway and new. Or was new, that day we went up it. You look up the highway and it is straight for miles, coming at you, with the black line down the center coming at and at you, black and slick and tarry-shining against the white of the slab, and the heat dazzles up from the white slab so that only the black line is clear, coming at you with the whine of the tires, and if you don't quit staring at that line and don't take a few deep breaths and slap yourself hard on the back of the neck you'll hypnotizse yourself and you'll come to just at the moment when the right front wheel hooks over into the black dirt shouldger off the slab, and you'll try to jerk her on but you can't because the slab is high like a curb, and maybe you'll try to reachto turn off the ignition just as she starts the dive. [language elided]

But if you wake up in time and don't hook your whell off the slab, you'll go whipping on into the dazzle and now and then a car will come at you steady out of the dazzle and will pass you with a snatching sound as though God-Almighty had ripped a tin roof loose with his bare hands. Way off ahead of you, at the horizon where the cotton fields are blurred into the light, the slabe will glitter and gleam like water, as though the road were flooded. You'll go whipping toward it, but it will always be ahead of you, that gright, flooded place, like a mirage. You'll go past the little white metal squares set on metal rods, with the skull and crossbones on them to mark the spot. For this is the country where the age of the internal combustion engine has come into its own. Where every boy is Barney Oldfield, and the girls wear organdy and batiste and eyelet embroidery and no panties on account of the climate and have smooth little faces to break your heart and when the wind of the car's speed lifts up their hair at the temples you see the sweet little baeds of perspiration nestling there, and they sit low in the seat with their little spines crooked and the bent kneews high toward the dashboard and not too close together for the cool, if you could call it that, from the hood ventilator...

What a wonderful, breathless description of driving down a hot southern road in the summertime. The language continues like this throughout the book - not endless run-on sentences, but language that evokes the moment being described. It's a phenomenal performance, besides being a wonderful study of character and southern politics. I really can't say enough good things about this book. I've reread it several times, and plan to do so several times more.