Choosing a new read is quite delightful but often a little bit agonizing as well--in a good way of course. I mean you are going to spend days or weeks with the story so you have to choose really carefully, right? What do you do when they all sound good? Compare of course. Which opening line is the one that catches the eye and the interest right from the start?
Home of the Gentry by Ivan Turgenev:
"A bright spring day was drawing towards evening; small pink clouds stood high in a clear sky and seemed not so much to float as to recede into the very depths of the blue."
"Before the opened window of a handsome house, in one of the streets on the outskirts of the provincial town of O . . . (it was 1842), sat two ladies, one fifty and the other an old lady of seventy."
On Tangled Paths by Theodor Fontane:
"At the point where the Kurfurstendamm intersects the Kurfurstenstrasse, diagonally across from the Zooklogical Gardens, there was still, in the mid-eighteen-seventies, a large market garden running back to the open fields behind; and in it stood a small, three-windowed house with its own little front garden, set back a hundred paces from the road that went by and clearly visible from there despite being so small and secluded."
The Trouble with Lichen by John Wyndham:
"The floor of the hall had been cleared. Someone had put rather sombre bunches of evergreens here and there on the walls. Somebody else had thought a little tinsel might cheer them up. The tables, set end to end down one side, made a white-clothed counter supporting plates of sandwiches, plates of bright cakes, some dishes of sausage-rolls, jugs of lemon, jugs of orange, vases of flowers, and, intermittently urns. To the eye, the rest of the room suggested a palette in motion. For the ear, even from a little way off, there was a reminder of starlings at dusk."
Ecstasy by Louis Couperus:
"Dolf Van Attema, for an after-dinner walk, had taken the opportunity of calling on his wife's sister, Cecile Van Evan, in the Scheveningen Road. He was waiting in her little bodoir, walking to and fro among the rosewood furniture and the old moiré settees, over and over again, with three or four long steps, measuring the width of the tiny room. On an onyx pedestal, at the head of a chaise-longue, burned an onyx lamp, glowing sweetly within its lace shade, a great six-petalled flower of light."
I have read all the authors before save Turgenev. All novels are about relationships more or less, though the Wyndham not romantically inclined relationships. He is also writing science fiction rather than straight forward drama (well, loosely speaking). Three of the four are translations. Oh, dear. Don't they all sound really good? I guess, even for me, it would be too greedy to start them all. Has anyone read one or another and can put in a good word?