Portis remains a blindspot for me. I know! I have several of his books sitting on my shelf, waiting for me to fall in love with them. I look forward to becoming — wait for it — a Portishead
I can't help myself. The first one that came to mind was Don Winslow's infamous opening line to his short story "The San Diego Zoo" from his collection "Broken":
I didn't include it here but in my presentation on openings I talked about how an opening shouldn't strive to please every reader, but rather communicate exactly what kind of experience you can expect. As an example, I showed Chapter One of Winslow's "Savages," which is, also somewhat infamously:
"When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon."
Neil Gaiman’s introduction to the 2016 Penguin edition of Frank Herbert’s Dune writes about the opening line of William Gibson’s 'Neuromancer': “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” He points out that because this was written in 1983, it invokes a very different image than it would today. In his 1997 novel 'Nowhere', Gaiman tipped his hat to Gibson with the following line: “The sky was the perfect untroubled blue of a television screen, tuned to a dead channel.” As you point out, with physical character descriptions in pre-cinema literature that now seem antiquated, I cannot read a book without first knowing when it was published. Without that context, things might not make sense, or in Gibson’s case, make a different sense without proper historical context. Simpletons always fixate on how accurately science fiction has predicted the future which is nonsense. Intelligent sci-fi is reflecting on the present by projecting a future, and one can literally get lost without knowing when the present is.
Due to an editing error, the novel that contains the first opening cited here was removed! It's "Drive" by James Sallis, the basis for the movie of the same name. (Yes, the main character is called Driver.) We regret the error.
For me, the all-time king of this is Charles Portis. Levi Stahl posted all of his page ones (there's only five novels, so easy) on twitter: https://twitter.com/levistahl/status/1229556525661859841
Portis remains a blindspot for me. I know! I have several of his books sitting on my shelf, waiting for me to fall in love with them. I look forward to becoming — wait for it — a Portishead
I can't help myself. The first one that came to mind was Don Winslow's infamous opening line to his short story "The San Diego Zoo" from his collection "Broken":
No one knows how the chimp got the revolver.
I didn't include it here but in my presentation on openings I talked about how an opening shouldn't strive to please every reader, but rather communicate exactly what kind of experience you can expect. As an example, I showed Chapter One of Winslow's "Savages," which is, also somewhat infamously:
Chapter One
Fuck you.
Then the opening to its sequel, Kings of Cool, is:
Chapter One
Fuck me.
"When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon."
James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss
This is an excellent one.
Related, but tangential:
Neil Gaiman’s introduction to the 2016 Penguin edition of Frank Herbert’s Dune writes about the opening line of William Gibson’s 'Neuromancer': “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” He points out that because this was written in 1983, it invokes a very different image than it would today. In his 1997 novel 'Nowhere', Gaiman tipped his hat to Gibson with the following line: “The sky was the perfect untroubled blue of a television screen, tuned to a dead channel.” As you point out, with physical character descriptions in pre-cinema literature that now seem antiquated, I cannot read a book without first knowing when it was published. Without that context, things might not make sense, or in Gibson’s case, make a different sense without proper historical context. Simpletons always fixate on how accurately science fiction has predicted the future which is nonsense. Intelligent sci-fi is reflecting on the present by projecting a future, and one can literally get lost without knowing when the present is.
What's the first opening from?
Due to an editing error, the novel that contains the first opening cited here was removed! It's "Drive" by James Sallis, the basis for the movie of the same name. (Yes, the main character is called Driver.) We regret the error.