I’ve once been told by someone who’s read a lot of what I’ve written that I always handle my beginnings and endings well – not that the entries in this blog are any evidence of such. But I don’t think I’m necessarily gifted in writing them. What happens is that I consistently devote completely disproportional amounts of time to them. For an article or an academic paper, we’re talking about 45 minutes on each the alpha and the omega.
I sit there and have staring contests with the Microsoft Word cursor while I think. Whoever blinks first loses. (This one time I lost and I was completely embarrassed.)
I spend so much time on them because I believe in their importance. They can shove a work into a reader’s permanent memory bank or they can knock it into cerebral incinerators. And so I don’t want my writing to curl and blacken in un-memory. So I sit and torture myself until I have something worthwhile. Neurotic? Slightly. But most interesting things are just that.
So, since I do appreciate an effort toward a great beginning, and since I have been awed by a few in my past, and since I have nothing better to do, I’ve compiled a short list of beginnings of books I’ve read and scored them. Warning: this is a little long-winded.
Note that I've only chosen four. This is because my apartment is very small and can't hold that many books.
Also note that I've included a lot more of Lolita than anything else. I chose to do so because the opening of Lolita needs to be presented in its entirety or it doesn't do itself justice. And because it's awesome.
The Corrections: The madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through. You could feel it: something terrible was going to happen.
4.2 of 6 >>>
I'll excuse the unhyphenated "autumn prairie" compound adjective in the first sentence because I can see how that would be distracting. I mean, look at Diddy's opening lines to Notorious BIG tribute "I'll Be Missing You." There are like four grammatical errors before he even starts rapping. But it doesn't matter there, because it's all about Diddy's deep feelings, you know. Fuck referents. Diddy is being deep. And it doesn't matter here, either.
Hell, maybe it was intentional. A stab at the copyediting people at FSG. "Corrections," huh? A stretch, but potential intentional irony.
What strikes me is the phrase "something terrible was going to happen." Why use such a hackneyed-sounding phrase to open such an ambitious novel? It's not like the author isn't creative. His knuckleball word combinations and fertile aptitude for metaphor would prove a heckler otherwise, so I personally think it was an attempt at grandiosity. A commonplace like this is something that could be remembered or quoted as to render it timeless. It hints at the ambition involved. The feat of this novel is its blowing up of the "little things" until the reader can see the fibers, the atoms, the neutrons that make them significant. And ugly. And beautiful. And fragile. And eternal. And...you get it. So the cold front over the prairie has the same ominous qualities of the "dark and stormy night."
Still, I think this opening's ego has burst through its chest. Just a little bit. The sentence fragment. The suspense of the colon. Just a hair too much obvious effort. No, not that colon. That comes later.
Ulysses: Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:
--Introibo ad altare Dei.
5.0 of 6.0 >>>
Above, I’ve written “opening lines of books I’ve read.” Now that I’ve included Ulysses, it might be appropriately amended to “books I’ve tried to read” or “books I kind of stared at like I would stare at a gigantic bin of colorful panties or a purple tortilla.” Consider the Latin within the first four lines a warning: “If you don’t know what Introibo ad altare Dei means, just put the fucking book down and walk away.”
I wish I’d heeded.
I don’t know what the hell that means. Dei is “God” or something, right? And we all know “ad.” That's about it. Supposedly, these four lines are just packed with subtle allusion that calls up hundreds of years of obscure scholarship and blindingly important literary history. Supposedly, that is what makes this "the greatest novel ever written."
But that's if you get it.
My thought after reading this opening was, "Why is he shaving outside?" But he does something linguistically that not many authors can do and that I can appreciate. You can see a little bit of this in the opening. He sort of subliminally emphasizes Mulligan's corpulence by having the words themselves make "fat sounds." The lippy, plosive initial "b" in "buck" and "bearing" and "bowl" evokes a certain image: it makes me think of really fat guys dancing and flopping around. Is that weird? You know what, I don't care. The man knows how to use the language, is what I'm saying. He ends well too:_____ (chapter) "On his wise shoulders, through the checkerwork of leaves, the sun flung spangles, dancing coins." (chapter)_____ "He saw his trunk and limbs riprippled over and sustained, buoyed lightly upward, lemonyellow: his navel, bud of flesh: and saw the dark tangled curls of his bush floating, floating hair of the stream around the limp father of thousands, a languid floating flower." (book) ____ "and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes i said yes i will Yes." Still, though, a little too much for me to handle.
I am in here.
4.7 of 6.0 >>>
Most people get this far, at least, before they give up. I've been told, once upon a time, that most people have this book on their shelves, but none has read it. Which I would believe. You might just keep it around for home-defense, though, because you could definitely kill someone with it.
This beginning gives us a pretty good idea of what we're in for, I think. It's a little trippy. It takes a look at a realistic situation that's a little too close for comfort.. The passage is also weirdly cerebral: the narrator is thinking -- thinking about the simplest of things -- and it's a struggle. Why would someone with this voice be thinking in an almost autistic way? Well, if you read this book, we can talk about why. Please someone read this book. Please? The beginning is pretty good, isn't it?
Lolita: Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.
Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.
5.9 of 6.0 >>>
Yes, I know he's showing off. But this is the best opening I've ever encountered. I would show off, too, if English were my third language and I could write like that. The allusion to "Annabel Lee" (and probably a lot more that I don't know about). The alliteration. The "Oh when?" The casual mention of murder that gets you real interested real fast. The blend of stark testimonial and wistful elegy. The impeccable melody of the language. This is just ridiculous. I could go on. The only reason it doesn't get a full six is because I didn't write it and I'm jealous.
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