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54 great opening lines: 38

A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hillside bank and runs deep and green.

Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck

*****

This was a title on a ‘must read’ booklist.  I’ve forgotten where and when I read the list, but I haven’t forgotten the book.  As I began reading, I thought: I don’t know where Soledad is, nor the Salinas River, but if it runs deep and green I want to go there.  I couldn’t stop reading, and when the end came and I had to, I passed it on to a son who reads very little, yet he, too, read it without stopping.  We had been moved equally but differently by certain lines or twists.  Afterwards, we both asked ourselves the same questions:  ‘Was that acceptable? What would I have done in his shoes?’

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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…

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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.

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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.

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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.