Favorite First Lines

Catchy and unforgettable first lines. Have you ever been so moved, amused, or provoked by the first line of a novel that it has remained in your memory long after you finish the book? I have been reading my past Moleskine journals and picked some of my favorites.

Without googling, see how many you can get and the winner–person with the most points–should get a prize. The more important agenda is to encourage my readers to read these wonderful works of literature.

1. “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” (7)

2. “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” (3)

3. “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.” (3)

4. “Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo.” (5)

5. “One summer afternoon Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary.” (5)

6. “124 was spiteful.” (5)

7. “Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu.” (7)

8. “I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man.” (5)

9. “I stand at the window of this great house in the south of France as night falls, the night which is leading me to the most terrible morning of my life.” (7)

10. “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. This was beginning with God and the duty of every faithful monk would be to repeat every day with chanting humility the one never-changing event whose incontrovertible truth can be asserted.” (6)

11. “Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board.” (6)

12. “It was love at first sight.” (3)

13. “I have never begun a novel with more misgiving.” (5)

14. “In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.” (3)

15. “Justice?—You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.” (5)

16. “In the town, there were two mutes and they were always together.” (3)

17. “All children, except one, grow up.” (3)

18. “They’re out there.” (7)

19. “One hot spring evening, just as the sun was going down, two men appeared at Patriarch’s Ponds.” (5)

20. “It seems increasingly likely that I really will undertake the expedition that has been preoccupying my imagination now for some days.” (7)

Genji 10-13

Chapter 10 Sasaki 榊 / The Sacred Tree. In which Genji’s father the Kiritsubo emperor dies, and Genji’s life takes a dramatic turn for worse. The Rokujô lady leaves society accompanying her daughter Akikonomu, who has been appointed a priestess, to the temple. Since the new emperor is Kikoden’s son, she and the Minister of the Right have their way. Fujisubo commissions religious services in hopes of freeing herself from Genji’s attentions and exhausts every device to avoid him. But she realizes the only way is to take up religious order and to be a nun. Relinquishing her title is the only way to resolve the implacable hostility of Kokiden. Fuijisubo’s decision resonates the opening theme that recurs throughout the book: The heart of a parent is not darkness, and yet he wanders lost in thoughts upon his child.” [13] Genji is exiled for being caught in Oborozukiyo’s bed.

Chapter 11 Hana Chiru Sato 花散里 / The Orange Blossoms. In which Genji sleeps with Reikeiden and her sister Hanachirusato. This chapter marks the unbroken succession of reverses and afflictions of Genji’s life after his exile from the court.

Chapter 12 Suma 須磨 / Suma. In which Genji goes into exile after being caught in Oborozukiyo’s bed. His chief sorrows and worries, as the line on p.13 has foreshadowed, are for his son with Fujisudo. But as time passes, the emperor and others in the court find that Genji has been in their thoughts.

Chapter 13 Akashi 明石 / Akashi. In which Genji impregnates the Akashi lady. This chapter marks Genji’s return from exile. The messenger from Akashi and dream of the old emperor convince Genji to leave the shore of Akashi. At the same tithe late emperor also appears in the emperor’s dream for Genji’s restoration. The New Year marks the issue of amnesty that will bring Genji back to the court.

References to Chinese Poetry. The Tale of Genji demonstrates the strong influence of Chinese literature on Japan during the time period.When his friends and brothers praise his Chinese poems during the early days of his exile, Queen Kokiden is infuriated. She quotes (p.251 Edward Seidensticker) a very famous phrase from the Shih Chi chronicle of the reign of Chin Shih-huang-ti that a enuch planning rebellion showed the high courtiers a deer and required them to call it a horse, and so assured himself that they feared him. In another occasion, when Genji plays koto himself, he reflects on the lady, Wang Chao-jun, one of the four beauties, who was dispatched to the Huns from the harem of the Han emperor Yuan-ti because she had failed to bribe the artists who did portraits of court ladies, and the emperor therefore thought her ill favored. While Genji himself fell out of favor because of his own wrongdoing, the references to Chinese classics abound in the book but they do not make less of the Japanese traditions that this novel professes.

Half Yearly Review, a Monday Musing

Now that we’ve come to the middle of the year, what do you think of your 2009 reading so far? Read anything interesting that you’d like to share? Any outstanding favourites?

The first half of 2009 has seen fruition of some of my reading goals. In the month of March I read Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell for the first time along with several bloggers. I’m sure many of echo that this book is the quintessential American classics. The current read-along takes me to 11-century Japan, when madame Murasaki Shikibu wrote The Tale of Genji, a novel that delineates palace and court life through the the sensibilities of Genji. My original goal was to read four epic classics in each quarter. That The Tale of Genji might spill into mid-autumn I might have to modify the plan and postpone Les Miserables.

The month of February has been devoted to reading literature by African American writers. Beloved, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Another Country, Sula, And This Too Shall Pass and Like Trees, Walking were read. On to the highlights of some of the best readings:

Most Memorable Character: Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout
One Book That Stays with Me: The Piano Teacher, Janice Y.K. Lee
Most Tedious But Worth the Effort: Beloved, Toni Morrison
Most Tedious But Probably Not Worth the Effort: The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie
One Book That is Good to the Last Page: The Writing on My Forehead, Nafisa Haji

Booking Through Hot Reads?

Now that summer is here (in the northern hemisphere, anyway), what is the most “Summery” book you can think of? The one that captures the essence of summer for you?

(I’m not asking for you to list your ideal “beach reading,” you understand, but the book that you can read at any time of year but that evokes “summer.”)

Moleskine’s Answer: Past experiences have it that so-called summer reading is synonymous with brainless and fluffy novels that made me wonder why I have even bothered with them. Recently I found a book called The Scenic Route by Binnie Kirshenbaum that might challenge this stereotypical notion. To be honest, the scenic cover is what attracted me at first. Obviously this soft-focus jacket art is a sure-win allure to woman readers even though bookstores do not make an effort to market it as chick lit. The story evokes that of Under the Tuscan Sun, except this is fiction: a divorcee woman met a man at a cafe in Italy and decided to cancel all her plan and drove along with him. It’s perfectly set up for the beach although I am not sure if I’ll get to it this summer. My whim overrides everything else, even the season.

For me this summer would be one highlighted with Victorian mysteries and other literary thrillers, as my recent acquisitions have revealed. I’ll be taking up Rebecca, The Moonstone, The Heat of the Day, Angel’s Gme, and some of Agatha Christie mysteries.

[211] Masquerade – Walter Satterthwait

Masquerade is a book-crossing find. I have never heard of the author nor the Pinkerton series. Masquerade is a sequel to Escapade. Phil Beaumont is a Pinkerton agent who is hired to investigate the suicide-murder of a wealthy expat, an American publisher named Richard Forsythe and his German mistress. Assigned also to the case is Jane Turner, who is an undercover as a governess. The two operatives describe their detective adventures in alternating chapters.

He is Irish . . . and perhaps the most talented of the expatriate writers in Paris. He wrote a book called Ulysses, a very scandalous but fascinating piece of work. Very accomplished, very intelligent. [148]
Nothing was seriously damaged, except possibly Mr Picasso, who began to limp to the far side of the room, glancing back warily over his shoulder; but Mr Hemingway hadn’t finished yet. As he lunged for the table, his elbow had slapped against another painting. [195]

What makes this whodunnit novel fun to read is not the murder mystery, even although the dark enemies are closing in on all sides, but the recreation of Paris after World War One. Satterthwait populates the mystery with famous names from the mecca of writers and painters. He depicts Gertrude Stein’s being a keenly observant personality. Earnest Hemingway’s clumsiness and boorishness might be exaggerated. A number of suitors and elites are also among the suspects, including a British detective author who set her husband up, a French court, and other local expatriate luminaries. Interactions between these characters outshine the sudden, contrived solution to a difficulty in seems insurmountable.

257 pp. [Read/Skim/Toss]

Acquisitions: Novellas

I was looking for a novella by Miguel de Cervantes, The Dialogue of the Dogs, in which two dogs set to satirize humans through the observation of their masters. Skimming through the book reveals some parallelism to Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov and evokes sweet memories of the narrating canine, Enzo, in The Art of Racing in the Rain. But I ended up buying these eight novellas–How can you resist these neat covers? Thanks to Melville House Publishing’s effort to restore these classics short fiction.

Book Crossing

I know Book Crossing hasn’t really taken off but I have stumbled upon a book-crossing book that somehow intrigues me at the coffee shop. The title would speak for itself: Masquerade by Walter Satterthwait.It’s a thriller about an investigation of a double suicide in 1923 Paris. One of the victims is an American publisher and those who are among the list of suspects are big names like Getrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway. Have you heard of Book Crossing?

Library Loot, a Monday Musing

Do you restrict yourself on how many books you take out from the library at a time? Do you borrow books if you already have some out? Do you always reborrow books you don’t get to?

Since my branch has closed over a year ago for seismic retrofit and renovation, I can count with my fingers the number of times I pay visit to the library. Recently a new branch opens across town in the Richmond District, right where my favorite indie bookstore is, so I have rekindled the fun of browsing the library stacks. I usually limit my book loot to 2 or 3 books, at most 4, assured that I will have plenty of time skimming, if not reading through them. I usually acquire on my own books that are very popular among library patrons, as the paging list can be painfully long. I don’t borrow books when ‘ve already had some out, partly because I’m not most organized with different due dates.

[210] The German Woman – Paul Griner

With the Germans suspecting I work for the English, and the English suspecting I work for the Germans? I don’t want to live my life worried what will happen. I did that for far too long, so now, who cares?[285]

During World War I, in East Prussia, the Russians have mistaken Kate and her husband Horst, a surgeon whose German descent had brought about his exile from England, as spies. By fluke an enemy whom they treated at the clinic takes them across the line to the German zone. For fifteen years, life in Berlin, then Hamburg, Kate, takes care of Horst who has lost his vision surviving a bombing. The scenes of civilian life—the continual, frantic hunt for food, the meagerness of commodities, the morose insistence on imagining the worst—evokes Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Francaise. Lawlessness and self-extermination seem to be the only choices. Kate Zweig, an Englishwoman by nature, nourishes an aversion toward England which she believes is responsible for bringing war to the civilians.

Hitler is evil . . . But rational Germans supported him because they starved under the republic, thanks to the French and the Poles and the English. Even the English soldiers were appalled by what the postwar blockade did . . . That’s the problem, isn’t it? To kill Nazi’s you must kill Germans too. That the war is justified doesn’t justify everything in it. [103]

In 1944, Charles Murphy, arraigned for treason, jailed for making anti-England films and exiled from America some 30 years ago, makes London home. During Nazi’s V1 reign of terror, under his German name Claus, he makes propaganda films by day and works as a spy for the British Ministry of Information after dark. The Germans are foolishly quick to believe his intelligence. Instructed to develop other agents throughout England for corroboration, Claus makes up most of his contacts, which explains his scouting and collecting mundane details of civilian life. When Claus and Kate meet, her experience in life, the layered past, immediately becomes the source of his film as well as the characterization of his fake contacts. But he also has doubt that she might be a German spy.

Had all of her touching emotional moments been manufactured earlier, to be produced at the proper time, or, worse, was she merely a wonderfully intuitive actress who understood what was necessary in every scene and could unearth it? [281]

The cleverness of The German Woman, despite the initial build-up of obscure factual information on the war, is this somewhat contrived fogging up of necessary details that obstruct reader’s clear perception of who Kate and Claus are. As alliance changes, so does one’s warrant of safety. What Kate and Claus had experienced in the first world war, in which they were both betrayed by their countries, becomes significant in their choice of alliance in the second world war. Beaten by war, they fall in love fraught with doubt. Evokes from this affair that is suppressed under the weight of uncontrollable events is that nationality can be out of favor. What matters is the human cause because on a human scale nothing is out of bounds. Griner’s historical details can be as obfuscating as Ondaatje’s prose. Espionage is wittily used to evoke issues of love, patriotism and identity.

308 pp. [Read/Skim/Toss] Paul Griner is the author of the acclaimed novel Collectors and the story collection Follow Me. The German Woman was partly inspired by the true story of a team of American filmmakers who were tired for treason just after the United States entered World War I for making a film critical of the British.

Genji 5-9

Chapter 5 Wakamurasaki 若紫 / Lavender. In which Murasaki is introduced. Murasaki, at least ten years of his junior, has a striking resemblance to Fujisubo for whom he yearned.  “The child must stand in the place of one whom she resembled.” For this reason alone, Genji decided to bring her to the court with him, although the suit for the hand of a mere did occur to him as being capricious. Meanwhile, Genji’s wife, Aoi, continued to treat him with such indifference that he thought her “the stiffest, remotest person in the world.” Fujisubo lamented the burden of her sin, since she had been meeting Genji at night in secrecy.

Chapter 6 Suetsumuhana 末摘花 / Safflower. In which Suetsumuhana is introduced. The princess of Hitachi is unresponsive and outrageously shy toward Genji’s flurry of letters.

Chapter 7 Momiji no Ga 紅葉賀 / An Autumn Excursion. In which Genji and Fujitsubo’s son is born, and Genji has an affair with Naishi. Fuijisubo was tormented by feelings of guilt and apprehension, to the point that she felt she had fallen under a maiignant spell. The baby she bore for Genji, whom the Emperor had mistaken as his, became a source of boundless guilt. As the Emperor made plan for his abdication, Genji sadly reflected that Fujisudo was now in an unassailable position that she was beyond his reach. Genji’s bearing a son with the Emperor’s concubine is as creepy as his sexual issue with an older lady, Naishi.

Chapter 8 Hana no En 花宴 / The Festival of the Cherry Blossoms. In which Genji sleeps with Oborozukiyo, the lady of the misty moon. She was the sister of Kokiden, the mother of the Crown Prince, who would become the new emperor. With the new reign Genji’s career languished, and while he must be more discreet about his romantic escapades as he rose in rank, he became more promiscuous to me. The Queen’s sister? What about the love he swore for Fuijisubo?

Chapter 9 Aoi 葵 / Heartvine. In which Genji’s wife Aoi is killed by the Lady Rokujô’s ghost and Genji has sex with Murasaki. Lady Rokujô was present at the Kamo Festival, slighted by the entourage of Genji’s wife. Was it literally Lady Rokujô’s ghost it was, or she could practice black magic? Whatever the cause must be, the spirit that impregnated Aoi eluded the power of the most skilled exorcist. Did the Rokujô minister the spirit? The ancient Japanese did believe that the soul of one so lost in sad thoughts could trouble another body.

His promiscuity is beyond control. Very creepy indeed. While he despises all the polygamous affairs that were rife in court life, he himself was also engaged in such libertine escapades. He’s total hypocrite to me.