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54 great opening lines: 34

The town itself is dreary; not much is there except the cotton-mill, the two-room houses where the workers live, a few peach trees, a church with two coloured windows, and a miserable main street only a hundred yards long.

The Ballad of the Sad Café, Carson McCullers

*****

The odd link between this story and the one I wrote about yesterday, Anna Karenin, is that I pulled both of them from an author’s bookshelf while she was thinking of something to dictate to me.  The Ballad of the Sad Café is sad at the beginning, sad all the way through, and sad at the end.  But the writing had me under its spell.  McCullers kept me turning pages with lines like:

‘So do not forget this Marvin Macy, as he is to act a terrible part in the story which is yet to come.’

We have to remember Marvin Macy for the next fourteen pages before he reappears.  Her storytelling is almost oral.  I wanted to learn from her and underline phrases on every page, but I couldn’t.  The book has to go back on my friend’s shelf.

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54 great opening lines: 33

All happy families are alike but an unhappy family is unhappy after its own fashion.

Anna Karenin, Leo Tolstoy (Trans. by Rosemary Edmonds, who prefers this title over Anna Karenina)

*****

This novel brings two things to mind:

1.  An author I work for dictates while I type.  She dictates for several minutes, then thinks for several more.  During one of these silences I once pulled Anna Karenin from her shelves and began reading.  After six months, I’d read about half the novel during our dictation sessions.  She rewarded me with my own copy so I could finish it.

2.  The opening line is famous, but Tolstoy didn’t write these words;  the translator did.  You might recognise or have heard the line as it is above, translated by Rosemary Edmonds, or another of the many slight variations on this opening proverb, like a recent one by Pevear and Volokhonsky:
‘All happy families are alike: each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’

Or a golden oldie by Constance Garnett:
‘Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. ‘

If you ever quote one of them, you’re giving credit to a translator.  And that makes me feel like my hours translating literature are worthwhile.

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54 great opening lines: 32

In Poland’s deepest autumn, a tall young man in an expensive overcoat, double-breasted dinner jacket beneath it and – in the lapel of the dinner jacket – a large ornamental gold-on-black enamel swastika, emerged from a fashionable apartment block in Straszewskiego Street on the edge of the ancient centre of Cracow, and saw his chauffeur waiting with fuming breath by the open door of an enormous and, even in this blackened world, lustrous Adler limousine.

Schindler’s Ark, Thomas Keneally

*****

I’ve read the book and seen the movie.  I haven’t been the same since.

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54 great opening lines: 31

And then the queer sounds would begin again, heavy, rhythmic breathing, and muffled whimpers as though someone had his head pressed hard into a pillow, afraid he would be heard.

Poor Man’s Orange, Ruth Park

*****

It’s a confident author who begins a novel with ‘And’.  Perhaps because it was a sequel…

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54 great opening lines: 30

These are tales for the ill, tales for the heavy air of bedrooms with herbal teas and hot infusions, tales to be told between six and seven, the hour when fever increases, when Norine was invited to come and dreamily tell stories at our much-loved childhood bedside.

Stories for Sick Children, Jean Lorrain

*****

Thus begins a set of French fairy tales I’m translating.  The next lines after the opener gave me cause to reflect yesterday on Macbeth’s witches and their cauldron:

“Into the bedroom of deepening shadows she would tiptoe, slipping in without a sound, sitting down at the head of our little bed, and in her toneless voice would begin:

Three white cats, with ribbons on their necks, dance around the cauldron.”

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54 great opening lines: 29

When shall we three meet again,
In thunder, lightning or in rain?

Macbeth, Shakespeare

*****

I studied this play twice in high school (two different schools) and never understood the political side.  Only the witch rhymes stayed with me;  my friend and I often cited them at relevant moments, especially when cooking:
Double, double, toil and trouble:  Fire, burn;  and cauldron, bubble.

In recent years I’ve tutored students who were writing about Macbeth, and so… I forced myself to read it to the point of understanding.

Right now I’m translating a French fairy tale in which the words chats and chaudière evoke my Macbeth textbook cover with its etching of three hags on a bleak plain waiting for the cauldron to boil.  But while in Shakespeare’s cauldron there boils the fillet of a fenny snake, in the French fairy tale cauldron there is nought but milk.  For the cats.

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54 great opening lines: 28

Let me lay it out for you:
a rural photography competition in a local town hall
and the woman next to me,
sitting with her husband and two children,
had travelled three hours to be there.

8 x 10 colour enlargements $16.50, Cate Kennedy

*****

I heard this poem read on the radio.  With ‘Let me lay it out for you’, the author had my attention.  It rewards hearing it in full.

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54 great opening lines: 27

One day in the spring of 1998, Bluma Lennon bought a secondhand copy of Emily Dickinson’s poems in a bookshop in Soho, and as she reached the second poem on the first street corner, she was knocked down by a car.

The Paper House, Carlos María Domínguez (Trans. Nick Caistor)

*****

This is a small novel I found on my daughter-in-law’s bookshelf.  I was hooked from the first line, and took it home.

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54 great opening lines: 26

The stranger came early in February, one wintry day, through a biting wind and a driving snow, the last snowfall of the year, over the down, walking from Bramblehurst railway station, and carrying a little black portmanteau in his thickly gloved hand.

The Invisible Man, H.G. Wells

*****

Yesterday I posted the opening line of Invisible Man (sans article) by Ralph Ellison, published in 1952, a book I confused with The Invisible Man (avec article) from 1897 which I listened to on a long car trip recently.  I found the latter interesting in the first half, but more and more disturbing as the protagonist attempted to violently and invisibly dominate his world.

Wells’s writing is awesome;  look at the words he chose to help us imagine guns and glass:

A resounding smash of glass came from upstairs. Adye had a silvery glimpse of a little revolver half out of Kemp’s pocket. “It’s a window, upstairs!” said Kemp, and led the way up. There came a second smash while they were still on the staircase. When they reached the study they found two of the three windows smashed, half the room littered with splintered glass, and one big flint lying on the writing table. The two men stopped in the doorway, contemplating the wreckage. Kemp swore again, and as he did so the third window went with a snap like a pistol, hung starred for a moment, and collapsed in jagged, shivering triangles into the room.

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54 great opening lines: 25

I am an invisible man.

Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison

*****

Last week I pulled this book from a friend’s shelf and began reading.  Great opening line, I thought, but why don’t I remember it?  After I’d read a couple of pages I realised the book was not what I thought it was, The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells, which I listened to in the car recently.  I’ve now read many more pages and am happy to have accidentally discovered this story.