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#72
10-23-2005, 06:37 PM
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Re: If on a winter\'s night a traveler --- Italo Calvino
Those are good too. Almost all of his stuff is very good to exceptional. And I'm not convinced that anything I didn't like didn't largely come down to personal taste rather than quality.
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#73
10-23-2005, 06:44 PM
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Re: Book with best opening paragraph
I looked up 'If On A Winter's Night A Traveller...' on Amazon to post it's first paragraph here, but I was beat to it. Best book I've ever read. Any of you Calvino fans familiar with Jorge Luis Borges? If not, you really should be, I imagine you'd love him too. The opening from one of his short stories follows:
"I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia. The unnerving mirror hung at the end of a corridor in a villa on Calle Goana, in Ramos Meija; the misleading encyclopedia goes by the name of The Anglo-American Cyclopedia (New York, 1917), and is a literal reprint of the 1902 Encyclopedia Britannica. The whole affair happened some five years ago. Bioy Casares had dined with me that night and talked to us at length about a great scheme for writing a novel in the first person, using a narrator who omitted or corrupted what happened and who ran into various contradictions, so that only a handful of readers - a very small handful - would be able to decipher the horrible or banal reality behind the novel. From the far end of the corridor, the mirror was watching us; and we discovered, with the inevitability of discoveries made late at night, that mirrors have something grotesque about them. Then Bioy Casares recalled that one of the heresiarchs of Uqbar had stated that mirrors and copulation are abominable, since they both multiply the numbers of men."
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#74
10-23-2005, 06:49 PM
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Re: Book with best opening paragraph
[ QUOTE ]
I looked up 'If On A Winter's Night A Traveller...' on Amazon to post it's first paragraph here, but I was beat to it. Best book I've ever read. Any of you Calvino fans familiar with Jorge Luis Borges? If not, you really should be, I imagine you'd love him too. [/ QUOTE ] I love him too. I wanted to post the opening to The Book of Sand, but I lent my copy of his Fictions to a friend. [img]/images/graemlins/frown.gif[/img]
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#75
10-23-2005, 06:49 PM
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Re: Book with best opening paragraph
Paul Theroux, 'Happy Isles Of Oceania'
(more striking perhaps because it's not a novel but a travelogue) "There was no good word in english for this hopeless farewell. My wife and I seperated on a winter day in London and we were both miserable, because it seemed as though our marriage was over. We both though: What now? It was the most sorrowful of goodbyes. I could not imagine life without her. I tried to console myself by saying: This is like going on a journey, because a journey can be either your death or your transformation, though on this one I imagined I would just keep living a half-life."
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#76
10-23-2005, 06:56 PM
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Re: If on a winter\'s night a traveler --- Italo Calvino
Most people today misunderstand poker. Let's be frank: most people know poker from the low-stakes games they now play(or grew up playing) with their family and friends. In these low-stakes home games, luck often plays a much bigger role than skill.
Play Poker Like the Pros -Phil Hellmuth, Jr. 2003
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#77
10-23-2005, 06:58 PM
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Re: Book with best opening paragraph
[ QUOTE ]
I am living here at the Villa Borghese. There is not a crumb of dirt anywhere, nor a chair misplaced. We are all alone here and we are dead. [/ QUOTE ] Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer I agree with others that the opening of Lolita is amazing. Lolita also has the best ending lines that I've ever read. It still gives me chills and I've probably read over it 20+ times. Obviously there is no point in quoting endings as they are inextribably tied in with the entirety of the novel. But it's good, trust me. If on a winter's night a traveler is also unforgettable. "You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the door; the TV is always on in the next room. Tell the others right away, "No, I don't want to watch TV!" Raise your voice--they won't hear you otherwise--"I'm reading! I don't want to be disturbed!" Maybe they haven't heard you, with all that racket; speak louder, yell: "I'm beginning to read Italo Calvino's new novel!" Or if you prefer, don't say anything; just hope they'll leave you alone." I also recall a fun Vonnegut opening in Cat's Cradle. "Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John."
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#78
10-23-2005, 07:00 PM
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Re: One Hundred Years of Solitude --- Gabriel Garcia Marquez
[ QUOTE ]
It's time for people to start putting up the names of the stuff they're quoting. I think I'm guessing pretty well, but nobody's going to know how to pursue reading a book further without the title. By the way, is that 100 Years of Solitude? [/ QUOTE ] Yeah, great choice. NT
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#79
10-23-2005, 07:01 PM
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Re: Book with best opening paragraph
[ QUOTE ]
I agree with others that the opening of Lolita is amazing. Lolita also has the best ending lines that I've ever read. It still gives me chills and I've probably read over it 20+ times. Obviously there is no point in quoting endings as they are inextribably tied in with the entirety of the novel. But it's good, trust me. [/ QUOTE ] Lolita is a never-ending rush of amazing passages. This is one of my favorite (especially the "picnic, lightning" part). I was born in 1910, in Paris. My father was a gentle, easy-going person, a salad of racial genes: a Swiss citizen, of mixed French and Austrian descent, with a dash of the Danube in his veins. I am going to pass around in a minute some lovely, glossy-blue picture-postcards. He owned a luxurious hotel on the Riviera. His father and two grandfathers had sold wine, jewels and silk, respectively. At thirty he married an English girl, daughter of Jerome Dunn, the alpinist, and granddaughter of two Dorset parsons, experts in obscure subjects-paleopedology and Aeolian harps, respectively. My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy had set: surely, you all know those redolent remnants of day suspended, with the midges, about some hedge in bloom or suddenly entered and traversed by the rambler, at the bottom of a hill, in the summer dusk; a furry warmth, golden midges.
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#80
10-23-2005, 07:03 PM
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Re: Book with best opening paragraph
[ QUOTE ]
I was born in 1910, in Paris. My father was a gentle, easy-going person, a salad of racial genes: a Swiss citizen, of mixed French and Austrian descent, with a dash of the Danube in his veins. I am going to pass around in a minute some lovely, glossy-blue picture-postcards. He owned a luxurious hotel on the Riviera. His father and two grandfathers had sold wine, jewels and silk, respectively... [/ QUOTE ] Why am I envisaging Dr Evil saying this?
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