Isn’t getting started always the most difficult bit? Flann O’Brien began his first novel, At Swim-Two-Birds, like this:
‘One beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with. A good book may have three openings entirely dissimilar and inter-related only in the prescience of the author, or for that matter one hundred times as many endings.’
Three openings are offered to the reader, and all three possible stories are woven through the novel, interspersed with the narrator’s own experiences of undergraduate life in Dublin. The plot sounds suspiciously Joycean -Joycean enough to win the approval of the great man, who commented that O’Brien was ‘a real writer, with the true comic spirit.’ More on writing and ‘comic spirit’ later – let that be one of the stories mentioned here and picked up later on in the blog.
If anyone wants to believe that writing resembles real life, then beginnings are traumatic, messy and all too quickly forgotten. It is endings that linger in the mind… Still, the first sentence of a novel carries tremendous weight, and what better way to start the blog than to run through some of the best beginnings? If there are any TMS readers lurking out in the darkness of cyberspace, please feel free to add your own examples. There are an almost infinite number of novels to choose  from…
Five famous first lines:
‘It was love at first sight.’ – Joseph Heller, Catch-22
‘You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller.‘ – Italo Calvino, If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller
‘Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano BuendÃa was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.’ – Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
‘It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.’ – George Orwell, 1984
‘High, high above the North Pole, on the first day of 1969, two professors of English Literature approached each other at a combined velocity of 1200 miles per hour.’ – David Lodge, Changing Places
