Posted on

54 great opening lines: 37

Marley was dead: to begin with.

A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens

*****

I love a story with a good moral, the type of story with a bad character who turns good;  it’s a formula based on the possibility that no one is without hope.  I read such stories to be spurred on.  The film Groundhog Day gives me the same buzz:  Phil the weatherman is a modern Scrooge who cares for no one and shares nothing. Yet against their will, both Phil and Scrooge learn how good generosity can feel.  Of course, my hopes are bridled by the fiction of Scrooge being shown, in one night, the cause and effect of his misery…

Posted on

Ailsa's travel photo challenge: Benches

Every park bench has a story to tell, says Ailsa.  She has posted some photos of benches to inspire all of us.

If the empty bench on the right side of this small park in Paris could tell a story, it would be this:  I had been sitting on it moments before I took the photo, watching a gardener and his disabled assistant plant flowers in the lawn while I recorded the details of the activity in my journal.

Clicking twice to enlarge the image will reveal the little plastic covers over each lawn flower.

Jardin de l'Hôtel Lamoignon, Paris
Jardin de l’Hôtel Lamoignon, Paris
Posted on

54 great opening lines: 36

Down below there was only a vast white undulating sea of cloud.

Beware of the Dog, Roald Dahl

*****

A good short story that I read this morning, twice.

Posted on

54 great opening lines: 35

When Mr Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton.

The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien

*****

There couldn’t be a better start to a sequel to The Hobbit.

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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…

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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.”