Spiegel & Grau | Spiegel & Grau’s Tina Pohlman chooses her favorite opening lines and tests our literary prowess.

Spiegel & Grau’s Tina Pohlman chooses her favorite opening lines and tests our literary prowess.

March 1, 2008

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.*

April is the cruellest month.†

April, come she will.‡

It’s April! Month of great opening lines. See if you can correctly match the first line with the book below . . .

1. “I was on fire.”

2. “It should be sufficient to say that I am Juan Pablo Castel, the painter who killed María Iribarne.”

3. “At night, stray dogs come up underneath our house to lick our leaking pipes.”

4. “It’s a new elevator, freshly pressed to the rails, and it’s not built to fall this fast.”

5. “For a long time, I went to bed early.”

6. “He’d cut His throat with the knife.”

7. “To get there you follow Highway 58, going northeast out of the city, and it is a good highway and new.”

8. “For a man of his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well.”

9. “When Kyrill Ivanovich Samarin was twelve, years before he would catch, among the scent of textbooks and cologne in a girl’s satchel, the distinct odour of dynamite, he demanded that his uncle let him change his second name.”

10. “I exaggerate.”

A. All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren
B. The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
C. The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead
D. Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee
E. Morvern Callar by Alan Warner
F. Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir by Lauren Slater
G. From “Strays,” the first story in the collection The Ice at the Bottom of the World by Mark Richard
H. The People's Act of Love by James Meek
I. The Tunnel by Ernesto Sábato
J. Swann's Way by Marcel Proust

Answers:

1. B
2. I
3. G
4. C
5. J
6. E
7. A
8. D
9. H
10. F

* The first sentence of 1984 by George Orwell
† The first line of “The Wasteland” by T. S. Eliot
‡ The first line of “April Come She Will” by Paul Simon

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