Once upon a time… so the opening sentence began
Constructed out of multiple first sentences from novels, a new short story cut-up and sewn back together. How many can you spot?
This is not for you.
Young man, let me look at you. You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveller. The story so far: in the beginning the universe was created. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the galaxy lies a small, unregarded yellow sun. It was a pleasure to burn.
First there was nothing. Then there was everything. If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. The moment one learns English, complications set in.
All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. More died today. I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smog-less Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974. All this happened, more or less.
All children, except one, grow up. As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin. You better not never tell nobody but God. I am a sick man… I am a spiteful man. I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Call me Ishmael.
Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. “Whenever you feel like criticising any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.” It was the day my grandmother exploded.
I am an invisible man. The bow I carry with me, I made of Este. She was made after the time of ribs and mud. Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.
I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. See the child. Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, “and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversation?”
Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested. “Where’s Papa going with that ax?” said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast. My suffering left me sad and gloomy. “Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents,” grumbled Jo, lying on the rug.
I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies. It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not. I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story. A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.
What’s it going to be then, eh? If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book. For a long time, I went to bed early. Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.
When I wake up, the other side of the bed is cold. There’s a feather on my pillow. The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel. The drought had lasted now for ten million years, and the reign of the terrible lizards had long since ended. Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. It was love at first sight.
It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. This time there would be no witnesses. The candle flame and the image of the candle flame caught in the pier glass twisted and righted when he entered the hall and again when he shut the door.
This word occurs because of god. He speaks in your voice, American, and there’s a shine in his eyes that’s halfway hopeful. Dr Iannis had enjoyed a satisfactory day in which none of his patients had died or got any worse. Marley was dead, to begin with. Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge. Our mother performed in starlight.
Here is a weird one for you. The time has come. I’ve been cordially invited to join the visceral realists. Since it’s Sunday and it’s stopped raining, I think I’ll take a bouquet of roses to my grave. If you’re going to read this, don’t bother.
Samsara! Samarra! Grand! The beginning is simple to mark. Like the brief doomed flare of exploding suns that registers dimly on blind men’s eyes, the beginning of the horror passed almost unnoticed; in the shriek of what followed, in fact, was forgotten and perhaps not connected to the horror at all.
Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more; or love the less, and suffer the less? A screaming came across the sky. There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. The primroses were over. The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.
