One other glaring omission (and one missed opportunity) from yesterday’s list of best opening lines. Some openings are so synonymous with the book that eventually the line comes to stand for the book itself. That’s certainly the case with Camus’s existentialist classic The Stranger.** You would do well to find a more detached and chilling line than Meursault's ‘Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can’t be sure’
And they have been stingy with their quotation from the King James Bible, quoting only the first sentence and omitting the poetically brilliant second. The first sentence is iconic; the second should stir even the most secular heart:
‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.’
**I’ve always thought George W. Bush unfairly maligned. But when he named The Stranger — a book about a man who, with scant provocation, kills an Arab and feels no remorse — as his summer read in 2006 I began to wonder.
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