Posted on

54 great opening lines: 49

Following the tragic events of February, 1937, when the Stinson Airliner VH-UHH crashed in the McPherson Range, I have received many oft-repeated and apparently sincere requests to write the story of that memorable rescue in which it was my good fortune to play the principal part.

Green Mountains, Bernard O’Reilly

*****

A rescue story that has to be read to be believed.  Ten days after their plane had crashed into rainforest in a cyclone, two men were still alive.  Bernard O’Reilly was their rescuer, and fortunately for us he was a great writer.  He was also renowned in south-east Queensland, Australia, as part of the first generation of the family that built O’Reilly’s Guesthouse in 1926 in the Lamington National Park, now run by the third generation.

Posted on

54 great opening lines: 48

Wine talks. Everyone knows that. Look around you.

Blackberry Wine, Joanne Harris

*****

I bought this book at a charity shop just before leaving for France, and read it during the first three weeks. I was staying in a small untouristy village and when I found the story turning on another small French village and its future – draw tourists or perish – I started to live in the book, unable to put it down. I finished it at 4am on the morning of my last day, reading it to the end to cure my insomnia. (It didn’t.) My bag was already packed, already too full, so I placed the book on the shelves with several other English language novels; it seems this flat is only ever let to English speakers.

I liked Harris’s tricky point of view – it’s the bottle of wine that narrates the story.

Posted on

54 great opening lines: 47

First, in my spare room, I swivelled the bed on to a north-south axis.

The Spare Room, Helen Garner

*****

I heard this author talking about her book on radio and needed to know more.  If not for the radio interview, I wouldn’t have bought a book about life’s end.  But she was touching, leaving me wanting to find the book that day, buy it and read it.

There’ll be gaps in my posting for a while – I’ve moved, for a brief while, to France.  But I have access to shelves of books I wouldn’t normally read, and they might have some intriguing first lines!

Posted on

54 great opening lines: 46

Mae Mobley was born on a early Sunday morning in August, 1960.

The Help, Kathryn Stockett

*****

I bought this book in a grocery store after seeing the movie trailer but not the movie.  Couldn’t put it down.  Kathryn Stockett listens to the women employed as The Help and writes what she hears.  Brilliant.  I could just about hear the women myself as I read.

Posted on

54 great opening lines: 45

Was she beautiful or not beautiful?

Daniel Deronda, George Eliot

*****

I am hooked by this simple question, even re-reading it today.  The rest of the book is not simple, it’s quite hard work.  But the opening question is brilliant.

Posted on

54 great opening lines: 44

What actually woke him was the unearthly sound itself – a mournful shatter of frozen midnight falling to earth to pierce his heart and lodge there forever, never to move, never to melt – but he, being who he was, assumed it was his bladder.

The Crane Wife, Patrick Ness

*****

This morning my daughter-in-law, who works in a bookshop or two, offered me three novels new on the market.  I turned each one over and read the blurb;  this one tells me nothing about the book but says simply ‘Patrick Ness is an insanely beautiful writer’, which made us laugh and look for proof.  Then we read the opening line, which was poetically wet but not beautiful, but I’m now at the end of the chapter and have found that, so far, Ness does indeed write beautiful words.  I’ll hold my judgement on how insane the beauty is.

Update:  I’ve just finished this novel and found it almost unputdownable.  A sub-story weaving through it is a bit other-worldly for me, and towards the end there’s a particular drama which continues for some pages but which is not resolved.  Yet I have to agree that Patrick Ness is a gifted writer.

Posted on

54 great opening lines: 43

Henry Holden decided to get an Italian prisoner-of-war after he had seen several at work on Esmond’s farm.

The Enthusiastic Prisoner, E. O. Schlunke

*****

Another short story by Schlunke, the author of The Irling which I wrote about a couple of days ago.  This line, beginning with a very Australian name, Henry Holden, caught my attention particularly when I saw it was about an Italian P.O.W.  It triggered thoughts of some photos from my father’s war album of Italians taken prisoner by Australian soldiers.  Many of the P.O.W.s were shipped to Australia and placed in camps, and their services were offered to local farmers who greatly benefited from the Italians’ excellent knowledge of food production.  There is a photo (above) of a stream of Italians heading towards their captor’s camp.  There’s also this image of a suave bunch posing for the camera:

Italian soldiers, North Africa, c1941
Italian soldiers, North Africa, c1941
Posted on

54 great opening lines: 42

I have just returned from a visit to my landlord – the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with.

Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë

*****

A joyless book.  I recently read it a second time in search of at least one happy moment but found none.  Flicking through the book today, I came across passage after passage of violent thoughts.  Take these three:
* ‘Wretched inmates!’ I ejaculated, mentally, ‘you deserve perpetual isolation from your species for your churlish inhospitality.’
* He dashed his head against the knotted trunk; and, lifting up his eyes, howled, not like a man, but like a savage beast getting goaded to death with knives and spears.
* The charge exploded, and the knife, in springing back, closed into its owner’s wrist. Heathcliff pulled it away by main force, slitting up the flesh as it passed on, and thrust it dripping into his pocket.

(The first line actually begins with the date 1801, but my WordPress theme formed a large block letter of the first character which made the date look ridiculous.)

Posted on

54 great opening lines: 41

While old Kronitz’s youngest son Waltie was being born without qualified assistance, the old man paced the veranda that ran around all four sides of his large, bungalow-style house, annoyed with his wife for her bad judgement after all her experience, and refusing to admit that he should have sent for the community’s wise woman sooner, even at the risk of having to pay her for a whole day while she did nothing but talk.

The Irling, E.O. Schlunke

*****

Quite a long opener of a two-sentence paragraph in a tale composed of many two-long-sentence paragraphs.  Old Kronitz dreads the irling, a mysterious twinkling light appearing on the south side of his farm during Waltie’s birth and which had appeared to his ancestors in the forests and swamps of Czestochowa in Poland.  Years later a drama develops when a fat Bavarian who considers himself an educated man arrives in Australia and buys the neighbouring property.  I was surprised by such a story about a Pole and a German, published in 1955.  It’s not hard to see where the author’s sympathies lay.

Posted on

54 great opening lines: 40

Helen of Troy awakes just before dawn to the sound of air raid sirens.

Olympos, Dan Simmons

*****

This is science fiction, from my husband’s bookshelf;  I’ve been searching his collection for something new to read.  The opening line got me in and I continued reading the rest of the page.  That was enough.  I’m not a sci-fi kind of girl.  But when I told him I’d chosen this book, he looked away, chuckled quietly and said, “Ah yes, that was a good one.”

If I haven’t read any novels by Dan Simmons, I can still make a connection through a great article about translation which he wrote and which I read and which was helpful to me when I was a translation student.