A book first talks to me with its cover and title. But these are definitely not enough. What is The Fountainhead supposed to mean? Turning to the first line I may just want to know more. For it reads, Howard Roark laughed. He stood naked at the edge of a cliff. As for the rest of the book, it is a part of history. The book is not about a madman as the first line suggests, but I kept reading to find out who this naked man was and why, indeed, he laughed. Sampling various books’ first lines, or even their first few pages is like ordering a round of tapas. It makes for a fulfilling visit to the bookstore, resulting in a more satisfying meal of the book I finally take home with me.
A good book needs a good take-me-home line, which is usually the first sentence. A brilliant opening line is from Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. I was born in the city of Bombay… once upon a time. The clever use of the common ‘once upon a time’, in seemingly the wrong place, made me think the writer was indeed very clever, and I wanted this confirmed. The answer was evident in the next few lines; this was certainly a skillful writer, but I wasn’t thinking anymore, I was reading.
‘When Mr Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton, opens The Fellowship of the Ring by JRR Tolkien. I knew immediately I was holding an allegorical epic tale. The clincher had been ‘eleventy-first’ birthday. Just that one interesting term made me go further through the trilogy.
But my favourite line is from Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner. It begins, I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975. It was economical, mysterious yet informative, evocative but chilling. It conveyed a time I was clearly interested in — the past. It was the story of a young boy who grows up to ‘become what he is today’. It was likely to go back and forth between flashbacks and the present day, another interesting way of telling a story. The language seemed clear yet carefully selected. But I think the clinchers were ‘frigid’ and ‘overcast’. Those two words alone set the mood to savour this writer’s writing. They drew me in as they immediately formed a picture in my mind. The pictures were inevitably from my own experience and reality.
Mohyna Srinivasan
is the author of
The House on Mall Road As told to Nidhi Sethi