Germinal, Emile Zola, 1885
[First Line]
Over the flat plain, beneath a starless night sky as black and thick as ink, a man walked alone along the highway from Marchiennes to Montsou, ten kilometers of cobblestones cutting straight through the beetroot fields.
Comment
Decades after first reading this, I can still feel the blackness at the bottom of the earth in Zola’s soul-stirring work about coal miners in 1860s France.
Death in Venice, Thomas Mann, 1912
[First Line]
Gustav Aschenbach or von Aschenbach, as he had officially been known since his fiftieth birthday, set out alone from his residence in Munich’s Prinzregentenstrasse on a spring afternoon in 19..—a year that for months had shown so ominous a countenance to our continent—with the intention of taking an extended walk.
Comment
A nonpareil novella, its brevity a contrast to the largeness in memory of its tragic protagonist.
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925
[First Line]
In my younger and more vulnerable years, my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.
Comment
I once wrote about Fitzgerald: “If illusion be the fool’s necessity, he made it a not shameful privation.” Gatsby is the reason.
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov, 1955
[First Line]
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.
Comment
Dazzling, still. A bravura of literary dexterity, bringing “Nabokovian” into the lexicon.
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 1967
[First Line]
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
Comment
A journey that altered literature forever, worth revisiting every decade or so.
Next: 5 Paradigms: Film →
A great little list of books… Germinal is high on my list of books that made quite an impression on me. A few of these I haven’t read, but now feel inspired to get around to them soon.