First Lines

I read an article yesterday about first sentences in books: How to be an Incipit by Paul Vacca. It's a bit annoying in places – quoting Camus in the original French (not so much as an English translation in brackets, as if we're all expected to know), and drawing, as far as I can tell, only on European and American authors as examples.

But it has a nice description of what makes certain first sentences special: "a particular vibration ... [a]s if they were uttered in an unconditionally confident voice, wholly sure of their facts: the quiet strength of the incipit."

Some music albums have that too. I'm thinking of David Bowie's Space Oddity (1969). "Ground control to major Tom." It has that air of quiet confidence; like he just knows he's writing a cult classic. But apparently his backing band later said Bowie was vague and gave little direction throughout the recording sessions; they found him "kind of nervous and unsure of himself." Oh well.

Vacca's article also talks about certain opening lines being like a "trap door", having "an inner force" that sucks us in, "a tipping effect".

For me, the mother of all tipping effects – although not referenced in Vacca's article – is found in One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez:

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

Or in the original Spanish:

Muchos años después, frente al pelotón de fusilamiento, el coronel Aureliano Buendía había de recordar aquella tarde remota en que su padre lo llevó a conocer el hielo.

This article by Claire Adam has a nice discussion of its peculiar magic: García Márquez bending the rules of fiction, and of time itself, to conjure one of the greatest opening lines in literature.