I am always drawn back to places I have lived, the houses and their neighborhoods. For instance, there is a brownstone in the East Seventies where, during the early years of the war, I had my first New York apartment. It was one room crowded with attic furniture, a sofa and fat chairs upholstered in that itchy, particular red velvet that one associates with hot days on a train. The walls were stucco, and a color rather like tobacco-spit. Everywhere, in the bathroom too, there were prints of Roman ruins freckled brown with age. The single window looked out on a fire escape. Even so, my spirits heightened whenever I felt in my pocket the key to this apartment; with all its gloom, it was still a place of my own, the first, and my books were there, and jars of pencils to sharpen, everything I needed, so I felt, to become the writer I wanted to be.

It's gotten harder to find compelling first paragraphs over the years--increasingly I am struck by how often first paragraphs are awkwardly contrived, even trite; by how poorly they bode for the narrative to come. The one I quote above--even though it describes an entirely stock situation (the nostalgic remembrance of a home) through the eyes of a stock sort of narrator (the nostalgically recalled wanna-be young writer)--was a welcome exception. There is just enough awareness on the part of the narrator that he's not God's gift to writing, just enough idiosyncrasy in the description of the run-of-the-mill apartment, to bypass the cliches with which the story's premise openly toys.

There's a prize for the first reader who names the author of the passage above, and the work it's taken from. Work from memory only, please. No consulting shelves or amazon.com search engines, no Googling lines.

Readers are also invited to transcribe opening paragraphs that they particularly admire.

Terrible openings will be discussed in a future entry.

Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany's.

Also, you have something weird in your comment blacklist -- I was told I had questionable content, and it said it was a colon.

Darn. Beat me to it on the guess. The NY Times ran this novel in serial form this past summer, you know.

For reader submissions...Erin, do you want us to identify the book & author, or leave that for guessing?...

"I am an American, Chicago born -- Chicago, that somber city -- and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way; first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. But a man's character is his fate, says Heraclitus, and in the end there isn't any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the doors or gloving the knuckles.

"Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing you hold down the adjoining."

[Yeah, I know that's two paragraphs, but only to the literal-minded. And I had to change the colon after 'my own way' to a semicolon because I got the same 'questionable content' message.]

Apologies for filtering difficulties--somehow my blacklist got the idea that it should block any comment with a colon in it. It's fixed now.

David--feel free to include author and work, or to leave it a guessing game, as you wish.

The cell door slammed behind Rubashov.

He remained leaning against the door for a few seconds, and lit a cigarette. On the bed to his right lay two fairly clean blankets, and the straw mattress looked newly filled. The wash-basin to his left had no plug, but the tap functioned. The can next to it had been freshly disinfected, it did not smell. The walls on both sides were of solid brick, which would stifle the sound of tapping, but where the heating and drain pipe penetrated it, it had been plastered and resounded quite well; besides, the heating pipe itself seemed to be noise-conducting. The window started at eye-level; one could see down into the courtyard without having to pull oneself by the bars. So far everything was in order.

That paragraph sounded like Truman Capote, but not having read B'fast at T's, I got no further with the quest.

"There is an interesting condition of the stomach where ulcers build like a coral, fibrous tissue replacing musculature, cicatrix dividing that shady receptacle into two zones, with communication by means of a narrow isthmus: a condition spoken of, with some awe, by the connoisseurs of pathology as 'hour glass stomach.'"
****************
"When Frieda Schwartz heard from her Shmuel that he was (a) marrying a black girl, the blood soughed and staggered in all her conduits as she pictured the chiaroscuro of the white-satin chuppa and the shvartze's skin; when he told her that he was (b) dropping out of school and would therefore never become a certified public accountant -- Riboyne Shel O'lem! -- she let out a great geshrei and dropped dead of a racist/my-son-the-bum coronary."
************
"They sprawled along the counter and on the chairs. Another night. Another drag of a night in the Greeks, a beatup all night diner near the Brooklyn Armybase. Once in a while a doggie or seaman came in for a hamburger and played the jukebox. But they usually played some goddam hillbilly record. They tried to get the Greek to take those records off, be hed tell them no. They come in and spend money. You sit all night and buy nothing. Are yakiddin me Alex? Ya could retire on the money we spend in here. Scatah. You dont pay my carfare . . ."

My favorite first two lines:

"The last man on earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door."

Science fiction short story by Frederick Brown: "Knock" (Note: these are also the last two lines in the story.)

Dennis:
Your 3rd is "Last Exit To Brooklyn".

Here is an opening sentence that hooked me.

"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."

I just had to find out what the heck the author was talkng about.

"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."

That could almost be an entry in the Bulwer-Lytton Contest.

Not exactly literature, maybe, but I remember the first few pages of Ira Levin's 'Boys from Brazil' as being riveting.

I read a book one day and my whole life was changed. Even on the first page I was so affected by the book's intensity I felt my body sever itself and pull away from the chair where I sat reading the book that lay before me on the table. But even though I felt my body dissociating, my entire being remained so concertedly at the table that the book worked its influence not only on my soul but on every aspect of my identity. It was such a powerful influence that the light surging from the pages illumined my face; its incandescence dazzled my intellect but also endowed it with brilliant lucidity. This was the kind of light within which I could recast myself; I could lose my way in this light; I already sensed in the light the shadows of an existence I had yet to know and embrace. I sat at the table, turning the pages, my mind barely aware that I was reading, and my whole life was changing as I read the new words on each new page.

----------
I also liked the Garcia Marquez.

"A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head. The green earflaps, full of large ears and uncut hair and the fine bristles that grew in the ears themselves, stuck out on either side like turn signals indicating two directions at once. Full, pursed lips protruded beneath the bushy black moustache and, at their corners, sank into little folds filled with disapproval and potato chip crumbs. In the shadow under the green visor of the cap Ignatius J. Reilly's supercilious blue and yellow eyes looked down uoin the other people waiting under the clock at the D.H. Holmes department store, studying the crowd of poeple for signs of bad taste in dress. Several outfits, Ignatius noticed, were new enough and expensive enough to be properly considered offenses against taste and decency. Possession of anything new or expensive only reflected a person's lack of theology and geometry; it could even cast doubts upon one's soul."
--J.K. Toole, "A Confederacy Of Dunces"

I read and re-read this passage many many times before I felt compelled to read the rest of the novel--I just kept cracking up to picture such a strange creature with such an odd code of social propriety.

It is one of my greatest disappointments, romantically, that my boyfriend STILL hasn't read the copy of this book that I gave him over a year ago. Perhaps this could be the subject of another thread--what books have you given to friends or loved ones only to find out that they couldn't care less about them, and how much of a disappointment has that been? Similarly, what books have you been given that you just can't get around to or bring yourself to read, and why?
Just curious.

"It is one of my greatest disappointments, romantically, that my boyfriend STILL hasn't read the copy of this book that I gave him over a year ago."

Dump him. He's a philistine with no sense of humor!

David Foster: I just finished "Darkness at Noon". Compelling. I didn't notice the opening, though.

"Call me Ishmael" and "that dark December in my soul" (a bit later) always got to me.

Also the opening of "Hitchhiker's Galaxy".

When it comes to taking chances, some people like to play poker or shoot dice; other people prefer to parachute jump, go rhino hunting, or climb ice floes, while still others engage in crime or marriage. But I like to get drunk and drive like a fool. Name me, if you can, a better feeling than the one you get when you're half a bottle of Chivas in the bag with a gram of coke up your nose, and a teen-age lovely pulling off her tube top in the next seat over while you're going a hundred miles an hour down a suburban sidestreet. You'd have to watch the entire Mexican air force crash-land in a liquid petroleum gas storage facility to match this kind of thrill. If you ever have much more fun than that, you'll die of pure sensory overload, I'm here to tell you.

"'Take my camel, dear,' said my aunt Dot, climbing down from that animal on her return from high mass."

My guess is Sophie's Choice, by William Styron. It sounds like Stingo wanting to be a writer in hot summer Brooklyn.