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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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Marianne's Photo Challenge: Multicoloured

Marianne from from East of Málaga has challenged us to find multicoloured photos.  See what she has done.

I immediately thought of our parliament houses during this year’s centenary celebrations.  Yep, the capital of Australia is celebrating its one hundredth anniversary this year;  a hundred years ago, this city wasn’t here.  There are lots of events in the celebration;  one of them was a week where the major institutions were lit with coloured lights, like this:

Old Parliament House, Canberra, Australia, during centenary celebrations
Old Parliament House, Canberra, Australia, during centenary celebrations

And unfortunately, like this:

Light graffiti on Old Parliament House, Canberra, Australia during centenary celebrations.
Light graffiti on Old Parliament House, Canberra, Australia during centenary celebrations.

This one was much more tasteful:

New Parliament House, Canberra, Australia, during centenary celebrations
New Parliament House, Canberra, Australia, during centenary celebrations

Marianne’s East of Málaga is a great blog where you’ll find a lot of information about Spain.  She has asked for challengers to point to a couple of other good blogs;  lately I’ve commented on Dennis Aubrey’s blog about Romanesque churches in France, and a blog by Cobbies69, a bloke who lives in New Forest, England, and writes about sixties music and about the history of his region.

I thank my husband for taking these photos.  I took some that night, but his are better.

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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.

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54 great opening lines: 24

The verb ‘to read’ does not tolerate the imperative, an aversion it shares with a few others:  ‘to love’ … ‘to dream’ …

Like a Novel (originally Comme un roman), Daniel Pennac (my translation)

*****

I’ve read this book in French.  On the back cover is a list of ten rights of a reader, which I found online in the printable form of an English language poster, and which I duly printed and stuck to the back of a particular door for everyone to read.