Ten Memorable Beginnings of Novels at the Beginning of the Year (Google translation from Portuguese)

[Leseratte]

Ten great beginnings of literature for this beginning of the year​

Rodrigo Casarin
Splash Columnist
01/01/2024 04h00

Illustration from the book '100 Views of Tokyo'Image: Shinji Tsuchimochi/Shikaku Publishing Company

I came to Comala because I was told that my father lived here, a certain Pedro Paramo. "Pedro Paramo", by Juan Rulfo (Record, translation by Eric Nepomuceno)

Today, mama died. Or maybe yesterday, I'm not sure. I received a telegram from the asylum: 'Your mother has passed away. Burial tomorrow. Serious condolences.' That doesn't clarify anything. Maybe it was yesterday."The Foreigner" by Albert Camus (Record, translated by Valerie Rumjanek)

July 15, 1955 - Birthday of my daughter Vera Eunice. I wanted to buy her a pair of shoes. But the price of food prevents us from fulfilling our desires. Currently we are slaves to the cost of living. I found a pair of shoes in the trash bin, washed it and patched it for her to wear. "Child of the Dark: The Diary of Carolina Maria de Jesus" by Carolina Maria de Jesus (Atica)

See the child. The boy is pale and thin, wears a tattered linen shirt. Fire the fire in the canopy. Outside are the dark plowed fields interspersed with snow lint and beyond them the even darker forests that house a few remaining wolves. His family is thought of as woodcutters and water porters, but his father, in fact, has always been a schoolmaster. He drowns in drink, quotes poets whose names are now forgotten. The boy crouches by the fire and watches."Bloody Meridian" by Cormac McCarthy (Alfaguara, translation of Cassius de Arantes Leite)

The first dragons that appeared in the city greatly suffered from the delay of our customs. They received precarious teachings and their moral formation was hopelessly compromised by the absurd discussions that arose with their arrival in place."The Dragons" by Murilo Rubio (is in "Complete Tales", Company of Letters)

I spoke to Paqui:
- Try not to die. In the afternoon I will help you.
It had rained a lot those days and the trucks could not enter the village. The truckers were cursing because of the rain. They were plaguing by so much water.
I didn't know Paqui. I thought he was dead, there in the clay.
But he told me:
one day it's you who can be like me "Eisejuaz" by Sara Gallardo (Relicary, translated by Mariana Sanchez)

Many years later, in front of the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia would remember that remote afternoon when his father took him to meet the ice. Macondo was then a village of twenty wooden houses and thatched roofs built on the edge of a river of diaphanous waters that precipitated by a bed of polished stones, white and huge as prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked a name, and to mention them one had to point with the finger. "Hundred Years of Solitude" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Record, translated by Eric Nepomuceno)

My father tried to kill my mother on a Sunday in June, in the early afternoon. I had gone to Mass at 11:45, as I always did. On the way back, I was supposed to pick up some sweets from the confectionery that was in a kind of shopping center, a set of temporary buildings built in the post-war period, while waiting for the reconstruction to finish. "The Shame" by Annie Ernaux (Phosphorus, translated by Marilia Garcia)

All happy families look alike, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. "Anna Karenina" by Liev Tolstoy (Cosac Naify, translation by Rubens Figueiredo)

Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. "Mrs. Dalloway" by Virginia Woolf (Anthophagic, translated by Stephanie Fernandes and Thais Paiva)

Página Cinco: Dez grandes começos da literatura para esse início de ano

Vim a Comala porque me disseram que aqui vivia meu pai, um tal de Pedro Páramo. "Pedro Páramo", de Juan Rulfo (Record, tradução de Eric Nepomuceno)

www.uol.com.br

​

 

[Mise Eire]

If I am out of my mind, it's alright with me thought Moses Herzog. (Saul Bellow, Herzog, 1964)

 

[Phil D]

I lost my own father at 12 yr. of age and know what it is to be raised on lies and silences my dear daughter you are presently too young to understand a word I write but this history is for you and will contain no single lie may I burn in Hell if I speak false.

- Peter Carey, True History of the Kelly Gang (2001)

 

[tiganeasca]

“For some time, I could not decide whether to begin these memoirs at the beginning or at the end, that is, whether I should start with my birth or my death.”
Joaquim Machado de Assis, Post-Humous Memoirs of Bras Cubas, translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson

“Since the days of Adam, there has been hardly a mischief done in this world but a woman has been at the bottom of it.”
William Makepeace Thackeray, The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq.

“You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings.”
Mary Wollstonecraft, Frankenstein

“The city of heroes was having a nap.”
Leopoldo Alas, La Regenta, translated by John Rutherford

“When Farmer Oak smiled, the corners of his mouth spread till they were within an unimportant distance of his ears, his eyes were reduced to chinks, and diverging wrinkles appeared round them, extending upon his countenance like the rays in a rudimentary sketch of the rising sun.”
Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd

“He—for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it—was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters.”
Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“Perhaps I could have saved him, with only a word, two words, out of my mouth. Perhaps I could have saved us all. But I never spoke them.”
Alan Paton, Too Late the Phalarope

“There were so many hairdressing establishments and funeral homes in the regional center of N. that the inhabitants seemed to be born merely in order to have a shave, get their hair cut, freshen up their heads with toilet water and then die.”
Ilya Ilf & Evgeny Petrov, The Twelve Chairs, translated by John H.C. Richardson

 

[dc007777]

"The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it." V.S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River

 

[Benny Profane]

"I was 13 years old when I met my uncle Marcelino: it was the first time when I traveled to Salvador. Three days before, I left Andaraí, my born city, in company of a dealer of diamonds, Mr. Gurmecindo, long-time buddy of my dad. The travel disturbed my heart. With so much happiness I left it - and my mommy cried hard when she hugged me - that before long the shocks of separation dilute theirselves on this new and fascinating experience: I was going to visit Salvador, the Capital" (Translated by me).

Dados Biográficos do Finado Marcelino [Deceased Marcelino's Biographical Data] - Herberto Sales

Edit: Adding the superb intro of Runnaway Soul by Harod Brodkey:

"I WAS SLAPPED AND hurried along in the private applause of birth—I think I remember this. Well, I imagine it anyway—the blind boy’s rose-and-milk-and-gray-walled (and salty) aquarium, the aquarium overthrown, the uproar in the woman-barn … the fantastic sloppiness of one’s coming into existence, one’s early election, one’s senses in the radiant and raw stuff of howlingly sore and unexplained registry in the new everywhere, immensely unknown, disbelief and shakenness, the awful contamination of actual light. I think I remember the breath crouched in me and then leaping out yowlingly: this uncancellable sort of beginning".