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First Sentences or Paragraphs #5: Best European Fiction 2010 Edition
[series note: This post is the fifth of five, in a week-long series examining first sentences or paragraphs. It’s not my intention to be prescriptive about what kinds of first sentences writers ought to be writing. Instead, I hope to simply take a look at five sets of first sentences for the purpose of thinking about how they introduce the reader to the story or novel to which they belong. I plan to post them without commentary, as one might post a photograph or painting, and open up the comment threads to your observations as readers. Some questions that interest me and might interest you include: 1. How is the first sentence (or paragraph — I’ll include some of those, too, since some first sentences require the next few sentences to even be available for this kind of analysis) interesting or not interesting on grounds of language? 2. Does the first sentence introduce any particular (or general feeling of) trouble or conflict or dissonance or tension into the story that makes the reader want to keep reading? 3. Does the first sentence do anything to immerse the reader in the donnee, the ground rules, the world of the story, those orienting questions such as who speaks, when and where are we in space and time, etc.? 4. Since the first sentence, in the wild, doesn’t exist in the contextless manner in which I’ve presented these, in what kinds of ways does examining them like this create false ideas about the uses and functions of first sentences? What kinds of things ought first sentences be doing? What kinds of things do first sentences not do often enough? (It seems likely to me that you will have competing ideas about first sentences. Please offer them here. Every idea or observation gets our good attention.) The sentence/paragraph sets we’ve been or will be observing: 1. first sentences from Mary Miller’s Big World; 2. first sentences from physically large novels; 3. the first sentences from every book written by Philip Roth; 4. first sentences from the Norton Anthology of Short Fiction; 5. first sentences from Best European Fiction 2010.]
“Albania is a country where no one ever dies.”
– from The Country Where No One Ever Dies, Ornela Vorpsi
“If I had urinated immediately after breakfast, the mob would never have burnt down the orphanage.”
– “The Orphan and the Mob,” Julian Gough
“A cousin of mine had an aquarium built on her terrace, a rather imposing tank where strange, exotic sea creatures amused themselves in the company of all sorts of local specimen, destined to be eaten.”
– from While Sleeping, Antonio Fian
“Castor P. was going out to die.”
– “And All Turned Moon,” Georgi Gospodinov
“After a certain length of time–or would it be better to say: uncertain?–I began wasting hours and hours on questions such as: ‘Budapester,’ ‘Budian,’ or ‘Pester?'”
– “Veres,” Neven Usumovic
“In the ninety-ninth year of his life, approaching his one hundredth birthday, Jeremiah Kadron returned, after a long journey, to his native Budapest, to his own house on Leander Street, where he had been brought as a two-year-old straight from the maternity ward, and which remained his permanent residence, excepting his trips around the world, some of which were brief, others quite lengthy.”
– “Jeremiah’s Terrible Tale,” George Konrad
“Didi had scars on her wrists and came from Bratislava:”
– “Didi,” Michal Witkowski
Tags: best european fiction 2010, first sentences
“After a certain length of time–or would it be better to say: uncertain?–I began wasting hours and hours on questions such as: ‘Budapester,’ ‘Budian,’ or ‘Pester?’” This is awkward… I had to read it three times without tripping up… Could be me, I am very clumsy…
I would stop reading all of these except the Vorpsi.
“After a certain length of time”…. a very short length …. I would stop reading that book.
I need that book.
I would stop reading all of these except the Vorpsi.
The second one (breakfast/mob/orphanage) reminds me of the beginning of a riddle my grandpa used tell us when we were little: “If he had seen the sawdust, he wouldn’t have died.”
I always prefer a little less Sturm und Drang and little more Humor, especially if it is bittersweet, wry, appealingly innocent and/or evocative, shamelessly twisted, or blatantly goofy.
used *to* tell us
Yeah, having reread the story now, I’ll admit there isn’t anything surreal or self-knowing about it, unlike much of the BEF10 collection. Ah, well. That sentence still makes a decent exquisite corpse assemblage, though it would be improved if breakfast was urinating and the orphanage had burned down the mob.
Still my all-time favorite European opening line: “For thirty-five years now I’ve been in wastepaper, and it’s my love story.”
I’m not sure how it goes on from the first sentence, but that one by Gough pretty much encapsulates everything I hate about formulaic narrative writing: where the story is often so set up in its first sentence as a confabulated scenario that everything thereafter is it playing itself out to match the opening utterance.
Two years in the maternity ward?? – “two-day-old”, eh. Or life going downhill in Hungary goes straight down.
Thankfully, it’s actually two-week-old. Otherwise that’d be one long gestation period, poor Hungarian mothers
That would actually be an interesting context for a novel: all the women in Hungary take 2 years to have a child.
I’m with you in principle, Blake, but I almost feel as though Gough is winking at the convention by having such a disproportionate cause/effect. It sort of has an exquisite corpse feel to it, where the “If”/”then” pairing might or might not have been written in succession, might be spliced together. I can’t recall from the rest of the story whether this plays out, though. Will have to reread.
winking at convention is still winking.
but yeah, i have no idea where the story goes, so i’m just assuming based on other stories that begin this way. i don’t like it, even if it is meant as disproportionate, as it is still a ruse. in fact, it often ends up feeling, to me, like it’s just being “wacky,” which is even grosser than just being more plain.
Yeah, having reread the story now, I’ll admit there isn’t anything surreal or self-knowing about it, unlike much of the BEF10 collection. Ah, well. That sentence still makes a decent exquisite corpse assemblage, though it would be improved if breakfast was urinating and the orphanage had burned down the mob.
Even two ‘weeks’ – why? – that’s a medical issue in the first sentence, right?, and not “straight” home.
The two-year-old would have been born two years ago – not conceived two years ago.
I was thinking ‘two years of hospital pampering before the parental smothering/deprivation chaos’. After I posted, I realized that lots of hospitals aren’t so comfy. So, to work with letters’s idea: all infants in Hungary (or Daytwah, or wherever) get abandoned for two years . . .
I, for one, have loved this series of posts, have ruminated greatly on the questions you’ve asked, and would like to see more posts like these in the future. Thank you, sir.
Mine was an attempt at offbeat humor, which letters journal ran with – but yes born not conceived.
In Budapest then (whenever this story takes place; 100 years ago?), likely, time in a maternity ward would have been much longer than it is today, and if two weeks was standard “straight” would be acceptable, I suppose.
It’s only recently that a two-day convalescence became standard in the US, for example, for mother and newborn, and further in the US this is less likely attributed to medical advances (though it is of course) than it is to insurance cost.
E.g. 25 years ago in the US it could have been stated: “a week-old straight from the maternity ward”, or “a week-and-a-half-old straight from the”….etc.
Or better: “a one-week-old straight from the maternity ward”, or “a one-and-a-half-week-old straight from the”….etc
it’s relieving to know that european writers seem to suck as much as american ones.
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