Memorable sentences

I am reading (very slowly) Salman Rushdie’s Languages of Truth at the moment. It’s a collection of essays and other writings, and it’s quite brilliant, but I am not going to review it just yet. There was one comment however that got me thinking. Rushdie talks about when writers and authors get together; inevitably they discuss favourite books, chapters and even sentences, and that triggered a thought – what are the most memorable sentences in literature? Not the most beautiful, or wise, or inspiring, just the most memorable?

Here’s a few that occurred to me, and the reasons why. Sorry if some of these are a bit obvious:

1) “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”

If you can’t tell me where that line is from then I really think you might be in the wrong place! 14 words, all short and almost all monosyllabic, but this line does so much amazing work in setting up the whole novel. We are in April, but where? Somewhere where in April the weather is bright and cold – so not hard to work out that it’s the UK with it’s consistently bad weather. It’s both bright and cold, not an oxymoron, but a precise type of day where the sun is shining but it still hasn’t warmed up. Eliot famously described April as the cruellest month, and I don’t think it is any coincidence that Orwell (for it is he) starts this dystopian novel at this point. It’s just one of those resonances that readers will either pick up on or they won’t. But so far so pedestrian – it’s a chilly day in April. But all of a sudden things get interesting, because the clocks are striking thirteen! What’s going on? First, why are there multiple clocks? We are in an urban environment where there are lots of different public clocks, and they all signal the time by striking bells. Not chiming you will note, striking, a much more violent, aggressive verb. But it’s the last word in this sentence that tells us we are somewhere at once familiar and also strange, because clocks don’t normally chime using the twenty-four hour clock system. So we are somewhere close at hand but far away – as of course the novel’s title has already told us. We want to know why this change to our approach to time-keeping has come about. So we read on.

Which leads me neatly to a haunting last line from, well, you know:

2) “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

Nick Carraway is one of the more interesting characters in The Great Gatsby, and his final reflections on the time he met Jay Gatsby and friends is so elegiac, so perfect, I find it popping into my mind regularly at moments of mortality. We do beat on against the current which bears us back relentlessly to the past, from which we cannot escape. And even if you think this is nonsense, and that the past is the past, gone and forgotten, then you still have to admire the poetry and this line.

3) “Marley was dead, to begin with.” Just how fantastic is that for an opening line? (I know, this post is about memorable lines, not best opening lines. But try and keep this one out of any list!) The way the second half of the sentence undercuts the first is quite brilliant, and sets up the whole story. It’s just a great joke. Dickens is recognised as a great story teller, but I am not sure he is properly recognised as a great writer. But he is, and anyone who can come up with an opening line like that – who is not going to read on? – needs to be respected.

4) “From the very beginning— from the first moment, I may almost say— of my acquaintance with you, your manners, impressing me with the fullest belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain of the feelings of others, were such as to form the groundwork of disapprobation on which succeeding events have built so immovable a dislike; and I had not known you a month before I felt that you were the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed on to marry.”

I love Elizabeth Bennet (don’t we all?) because of her fire, and it comes out full force here in this condemnation of the haughty Mr Fitzwilliam Darcy. She is in full flow and unstoppable, (this is all one sentence) and she tears him apart – “groundwork of disapprobation” – quite magnificently. And somehow Austen manages to let the reader know that underneath this anger and disdain, she doesn’t really mean it, or she does but is still attracted to him, (otherwise why the passion?) which is a point of view technique that I don’t think any author before or since has bettered.

5) Titus is wading through his childhood. A ridiculously simple line, but for me extraordinarily resonant. Childhood can be like that, something we have to endure not because it is painful (although it can be of course) but because it is so long, and the things we want to do need us to be older, richer, more empowered. The Gormenghast trilogy is a series that escapes any possible attempt to be ‘about’ anything, but Titus’s journey from his birth in that wonderful first chapter of Titus Groan reaching an incredible climax in his confrontation with Steerpike at the end of Gormenghast forms the series core. In writing about it I realise that it has been quite some time since I read the novels and might be overdue a reread.

6, “If nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do.” OK, I am cheating now, this line isn’t from a book, but it’s still amazing. I’m still not entirely sure I understand it, but if I have got this right it is an incredible summary of where we find ourselves in our brief time on the planet, isn’t it?

So what would your memorable line – from a book or elsewhere – be?

Less by Andrew Sean Greer, 2017

Arthur Less, a middle-aged novelist, just coming out of a long term relationship with a younger man who is now getting married, can’t face the idea of attending the wedding. To avoid having to decline an invitation he accepts an improbable series of invitations to different events around the world, just as an excuse to be out of the country on the fateful day. The improbability of all these invitations just lying around waiting to be accepted is something the reader will have to accept. Although initially intended to just skip the wedding, Less’s adventure builds into an around the world odyssey of speaking engagements, conferences, interviews and residencies. And that’s pretty much it – we follow him on this journey and he gets into the inevitable ‘scrapes’ and misunderstandings, too many sleeping pills, mistaken identity (we are led to believe that Less is a common name in the book-writing game) and incidental romantic encounters.

The first leg of Less’s odyssey is in New York, where he chairs an event for a successful and overrated science fiction writer. Then on to Mexico, where he takes part in a panel discussion about his former lover’s work – as a younger man Less was in a long-term relationship with a much older and far more respected writer. In Italy an earlier novel of his is a candidate for an obscure literary award which he improbably wins. Then on to Germany, where he teaches a writing course entitled Read Like a Vampire, Write Like Frankenstein and has a brief fling with a much younger student. Here Greer subtly introduces the thought that the previously omniscient narrator, who has revealed Less’s intimate thoughts and feelings, might be a character within the novel, or the author breaking the fourth wall. The stages of Less’s journey continue breathlessly – Paris, Morocco, Japan and India, each illustrated with local colour and touches of humour, but there is little time to breathe before we are off again.

Much of Less is essentially meta-fiction (at the risk of being patronising, I have always found it easiest to understand the use of the term ‘meta’ in virtually any context by substituting the word ‘about’. So meta-fiction is fiction about fiction). Or to put it another way this is a novel about being a novelist. Less the character is struggling to have his latest novel published. His publisher finds it simply too depressing.

“It was about a middle-aged gay man walking around San Francisco. And, you know, his … his sorrows … ”

As of course this novel might be were it to show Less struggling with his heartbreak. But he manages to persuade his publisher to accept his novel by inverting every bad or depressing thing that happens to his central character into a positive. And that’s precisely what happens to Less himself – he bumbles his way around the world and things work out well for him at each step of his journey. The gods of travel look after him to ensure he finds his way to his next destination on time however drunk or jet-lagged he may be. And the novel ends with a happy ever after that never really looked on the cards.

I found it hard to engage with Less. He is a bit anodyne, a bit Prufrockian:

“Name a day, name an hour, in which Arthur Less was not afraid. Of ordering a cocktail, taking a taxi, teaching a class, writing a book. Afraid of these and almost everything else in the world. Strange, though; because he is afraid of everything, nothing is harder than anything else. Taking a trip around the world is no more terrifying than buying a stick of gum. The daily dose of courage.”

We know from the outset this is going to be a voyage of self-discovery with a happy ever after ending, but I found the episodic structure too predictable. I wondered at one point whether the chapters had been written as columns for a magazine (as with the original version of Bridget Jones’s Diary for instance, or Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City, which is an obvious influence on this text) but apparently not. Nevertheless it has that feel – no time to develop a character because we only have a few days to spend with them, so they never get beyond a brief sketch.

But while the novel’s plot and structure disappoints, Less was an enjoyable read – Less’s mishaps are comical, and Greer’s superb command of imagery and skill in constructing a sentence always kept me reading. On almost very page there is a brilliant simile or metaphor – it is virtually impossible to choose one or two that could represent the whole, but what about

“Bougainvillea bloomed on their porch like a discarded prom dress“;

or how’s this for the sensation of drinking exotic beer:

“…and they were having some new kind of beer that tasted like aspirin and smelled like magnolias and cost more than a hamburger.”?

The more I think about it the more I believe that Greer is a gifted writer who has yet to find (in this novel at least) a suitable vehicle for his skills. On this evidence I am sure it will happen.