robert mccrum | the 10 best first lines in fiction
by Jacqueline Winter Thomas
NOTES from the UNDERGROUND No. 215 (& Poetry Dispatch) | April 30, 2012
The 10 Best First Lines in Fiction
(Our Guide to the greatest lines of novel in the English language from Jane Austen to James Joyce—The Guardian)
James Joyce
Ulysses (1922)
“Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.” This is the classic third-person opening to the 20th-century novel that has shaped modern fiction, pro and anti, for almost a hundred years.
I commented thus on the original site:
I have to add one from the wonderful and tragic British author, Ann Quin; the first line of her first novel, Berg, is:
“A man called Berg, who changed his name to Greb, came to a seaside town intending to kill his father . . .”
Who can resist that? For more on Ann Quin visit http://wp.me/p1mTHK-NQ .
And how about my eternal favorite ANTI-excitement generating starting line: Samuel Beckett’s Murphy, which starts, “The sun shone, having no alternative, upon the nothing new.”