favorite opening paragraphs
literature gems amid the boring mfa literary fiction panic discourse
I’ve been cautiously reading a lot of MFA lit fic discourse over the last few months, and also discussing the ramifications of the “MFA writing” style with my friends. Many people have been criticizing modern day styles of literature, and I do mostly agree; I think there is a particular writing style where you can tell that the author attended an MFA program—oftentimes, they all feel very homogenous and not dynamic at all. (it feels very…undergrad advanced fiction workshop-esque sometimes) This is not to say that all MFA graduates write like this, but there definitely is a noticeable trend.
I thought I’d put together some opening paragraphs from classics, nonfiction, and contemporary literary fiction alike that I really enjoyed reading and linger in my mind even after I close the book. I think literature is at its best when the writing feels like it has its own beating heart—something that, when you read it, feels like it can stand on its own two legs and become a creature of its own. Some authors excel at breathing life into words on a page, so here are some that I adore, in no particular order. Hopefully you can find a new favorite book!
No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.
—The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson
The Salinas Valley is in Northern California. It is a long narrow swale between two ranges of mountains, and the Salinas River winds and twists up the center until it falls at last into Monterey Bay. I remember my childhood names for grasses and secret flowers. I remember where a toad may live and what time the birds awaken in the summer—and what trees and seasons smelled like—how people looked and walked and smelled even. The memory of odors is very rich.
—East of Eden, John Steinbeck
The sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it. Gradually as the sky whitened a dark line lay on the horizon dividing the sea from the sky and the grey cloth became barred with thick strokes moving, one after another, beneath the surface, following each other, pursuing each other, perpetually.
—The Waves, Virginia Woolf
Throughout your life you dream about an antique see-saw. You never see it – the you in the dream is sightless – but you know what it looks like, all rusted iron and worn wood, and you can hear it, creaking in the dark. It tips on its pivot independently of a person, and there’s a wailing sound, like a high-pitched police siren, accompanying its movements. You are stuck fast in the blackness and you can hear the steady thud as each end collides with the ground and the growing intensity of its scream. Eventually the sound seems to be coming from inside your skull.”
—Tennis Lessons, Susannah Dickey
It was an early, very warm morning in July, and it had rained during the night. The bare granite steamed, the moss and crevices were drenched with moisture, and all the colours everywhere had deepened. Below the veranda, the vegetation in the morning shade was like a rainforest of lush, evil leaves and flowers, which she had to be careful not to break as she searched. She held one hand in front of her mouth and was constantly afraid of losing her balance.
“What are you doing?” asked little Sophia.
“Nothing,” her grandmother answered. “That is to say,” she added angrily, “I’m looking for my false teeth.”
—The Summer Book, Tove Jansson
You cannot cut an apple with an apple. You cannot cut an orange with an orange. You can, if you have a knife, cut an apple or an orange. Or slice open the underbelly of a fish. Or, if your hands are steady enough and the blade is sharp enough, sever an umbilical cord.
—The Book of Goose, Yiyun Li
, being so busy, she’d just come from the grocery shopping that the maid had rushed because she was shirking more every day, though she only came in to get lunch and dinner ready, she’d dealt with a few things on the phone, including one awfully diffi cult call to the plumber, she’d gone to the kitchen to put away the groceries and place the apples, which were her best food, in the fruit bowl, despite not knowing how to arrange fruit, but Ulisses had hinted at the future possibility of for example making the fruit bowl look pretty, saw what the maid had left for dinner before leaving, because lunch had been terrible, meanwhile she’d noticed that the small terrace which was a perk of her ground-fl oor apartment needed to be washed, got a call inviting her to a charity cocktail party for something she hadn’t quite understood but which was related to her primary school, thank God it was the holidays, gone to her wardrobe to choose a dress that would make her extremely attractive for the meeting with Ulisses who’d already said that she had no fashion sense, remembered that as it was Saturday he’d have more time because he wasn’t teaching at the University’s summer school on Saturdays, thought about what he was becoming for her, about what he seemed to want her to know, supposed that he was just wanting her to live without pain, he’d once said that he wanted, when someone asked her name, for her not to say “Lóri” but to be able to reply “my name is I,” since your name, he’d said, is an I, wondered if the black-and-white dress would do,
—An Apprenticeship or the Book of Pleasures, Clarice Lispector