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Some of the greatest opening sentences in world literature are no more than a few words long. They might affect a statement of fact, or involve an abrupt exclamation or earnest entreaty. Take for instance:<\/p>\n
Call me Ishmael.<\/p>\n
from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick<\/em> (1851), and more recently:<\/p>\n See the child.<\/p>\n from Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian<\/em> (1985). Other sentences suggestively introduce a central figure, whether the narrator or the object of a narrator’s gaze, as with:<\/p>\n For a long time, I went to bed early.<\/p>\n from Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way\u00a0<\/em>(1913), and:<\/p>\n Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.<\/p>\n from Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita<\/em><\/a> (1955). There are others which immediately place us in the thick of the action, or in the middle of some conundrum, forcing us to wait patiently for some central mystery to unfold:<\/p>\n As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.<\/p>\n from Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis<\/em> (1915).<\/p>\n It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.<\/p>\n from Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar<\/em> (1963). And:<\/p>\n It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not.<\/p>\n from Paul Auster’s City of Glass<\/em> (1985). And then there are those which satirically or otherwise relish in the universal, for example:<\/p>\n It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.<\/p>\n from Jane Austen’s\u00a0Pride and Prejudice <\/em>(1813), and pithier still:<\/p>\n All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.<\/p>\n from Leo Tolstoy<\/a>‘s Anna Karenina<\/em>\u00a0(1878).<\/p>\n But there is an art too to the longer opening sentence, which has flourished over the lengthy course of modern literature. These longer first lines typically abound in conjunctions and in marks of punctuation, commas, colons, semi-colons, and all manner of dashes. They can be by turns hesitant and hysterically out of breath, discursive where they are not deliberately diversionary, while some even set out a series of rules by which the ensuing text ought to be read.<\/p>\n The long opening sentence\u00a0is well demonstrated by a number of works foundational to the modern English novel. But across world literature, we find great long opening\u00a0sentences\u00a0in many novellas and short stories too. Indeed, something about these shorter forms – self contained, covering brief spans of time, often displaying a heightened subjectivity, amorphous and experimental and drawing from the fantastical, the philosophical, and the forms of anecdote, parable, and fable – seems particularly conducive to subtle and convoluted, bounding and explosive, altogether brilliant long openings.<\/p>\n * * *<\/p>\n To begin with a long opening sentence which in many ways seems the epitome of the type, Franz Kafka’s ‘A Country Doctor’ remains one of the German-language writers most elusive works. A short story amounting to just six pages, it depicts the nighttime journey in the depths of winter of a regional doctor, who attends the hopeless case of a sick young boy. It blends elements of the fantastic and grotesque – the enormous horses on which the doctor makes his journey are conjured out of the cold night, and later he is forced by the locals to crawl into bed with the dying boy –\u00a0and throughout the doctor thinks back upon the fate of his maid, who he has left obscurely understanding that she will be raped.<\/p>\n The meaning of ‘A Country Doctor’ evades critical perspective. It was written in 1917, when Kafka was sick, but before he was diagnosed with the tuberculosis which would ultimately kill him: the nature of his illness only became clear after a bloody coughing fit on the night of 9 August 1917 with the text already complete, and he apparently finalised publication details with Kurt Wolff on 12 September. The story would appear as the title piece of a collection in 1919. Kafka’s favourite uncle, Siegfried Lowy, was himself a country doctor, and an inspiration for the story; while Kafka dedicated the full collection to his father.<\/p>\n ‘A Country Doctor’ equally contains one of the best final lines in all of literature. Its opening sentence amounts to almost half of the first page of the text:<\/p>\n I was in great perplexity; I had to start on an urgent journey; a seriously ill patient was waiting for me in a village ten miles off; a thick blizzard of snow filled all the wide spaces between him and me; I had a gig, a light gig with big wheels, exactly right for our country roads; muffled in furs, my bag of instruments in hand, I was in the courtyard all ready for the journey; but there was no horse to be had, no horse.<\/p>\n \u2014 Franz Kafka, ‘A Country Doctor’ (1916), translated by Willa and Edwin Muir<\/p>\n * * *<\/p>\n While perhaps slightly less famous than the opening to Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler<\/em> (1979), which self-referentially begins ‘Y<\/strong>ou are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler<\/i>.’, the strident opening sentence of Calvino’s earlier work, Invisible Cities<\/em>,\u00a0has it beat for oblique grandeur:<\/p>\n Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity than he shows any other messenger or explorer of his.<\/p>\n \u2014\u00a0Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities<\/em> (1972), translated by William Weaver<\/p>\n * * *<\/p>\n Often considered the beginning of the novel in English, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe<\/em> was first published under a title which could itself stand as a great long sentence. It’s full title upon publication in 1719 was ‘The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver’d by Pyrates.<\/i>‘ The novel’s opening line reads:<\/p>\n I was born in the Year 1632, in the City of York, of a good Family, tho’ not of that Country, my Father being a Foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull; He got a good Estate by Merchandise, and leaving off his Trade, lived afterward at York, from whence he had married my Mother, whose Relations were named Robinson, a very good Family in that Country, and from whom I was called Robinson Kreutznaer; but by the usual Corruption of Words in England, we are now called, nay we call our selves, and write our Name Crusoe, and so my Companions always call’d me.<\/p>\n \u2014\u00a0Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe<\/em> (1719)<\/p>\n * * *<\/p>\n Laurence Sterne’s humorous novel Tristram Shandy<\/em>, purportedly the autobiography of the titular narrator, is characterised by digressions, double entendres, obscene allusions, the wholesale borrowing of other texts, and graphic devices including a blacked-out page. This most modern of novels has been cited as an influence on the works of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Salman Rushdie. Its long and pondering opening sentence:<\/p>\n I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly consider’d how much depended upon what they were then doing;\u2014that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;\u2014and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost;\u2014Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,\u2014I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that in which the reader is likely to see me.<\/p>\n \u2014\u00a0Laurence Sterne, The Life & Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman<\/em> (1759)<\/p>\n * * *<\/p>\n Heinrich von Kleist’s collapsing worlds, anxiously captured here and in other short stories like ‘The Earthquake in Chile’ and ‘Michael Kohlhaas’, were of signal importance for Kafka.<\/p>\n In M\u2014, an important town in northern Italy, the widowed Marquise of O\u2014, a lady of unblemished reputation and the mother of several well-brought-up children, inserted the following announcement in the newspapers: that she had, without knowledge of the cause, come to find herself in a certain situation; that she would like the father of the child she was expecting to disclose his identity to her; and that she was resolved, out of consideration for her family, to marry him.<\/p>\n \u2014\u00a0Heinrich von Kleist, ‘The Marquise of O\u2014’ (1808), translated by David Luke and Nigel Reeves<\/p>\n * * *<\/p>\n Worth noting because it is probably the best known of all long openings – though infrequently quoted in full – the first sentence of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities<\/em> fails the standard of greatness, trite and cloying in its easy oppositions:<\/p>\n It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way \u2013 in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.<\/p>\n \u2014\u00a0Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities<\/em> (1859)<\/p>\n * * *<\/p>\n The opening line of Katherine Mansfield’s short story ‘Bliss’ suggests one of the key modes of the New Zealand-born author’s fiction, in which moments of keen insight blister\u00a0the mundane lives of the provincial middle class:<\/p>\n Although Bertha Young was thirty she still had moments like this when she wanted to run instead of walk, to take dancing steps on and off the pavement, to bowl a hoop, to throw something up in the air and catch it again, or to stand still and laugh at \u2013 nothing \u2013 at nothing, simply.<\/p>\n \u2014 Katherine Mansfield, ‘Bliss’ (1921)<\/p>\n * * *<\/p>\n