Famous First/Last Lines

"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there."

This is the opening line of The Go-Between, published in 1953 by L. P. Hartley, who was born on December 30, 1895 in Whittlesey, UK and died on December 13, 1972 in London. The story follows Leo Colston, who finds an old diary he wrote as an adolescent. As he reads through the diary, he begins remembering events which took place in the summer of 1900 when he stayed with his school friend, Marcus Maudsley. He realizes how these events affected the rest of his life.

This book comes highly recommended. "The excellence of the writing alone warrants reading of the book. But what makes the novel so engrossing is the drama and suspense of the plot" (Joe Shallet). I have never read a book set in the early 1900s-50s, so I wouldn't have much to compare it to. Leo seems to be a man of many faces, a hardened shell of a man living in a boy's mind.


"I closed my eyes, head dropping, like a person drunk for so long she no longer knows she's drunk, and then, drunk, awoke to the world which lay before me."

 Kathy Acker's Don Quixote, published in 1986, closed with this line. Acker was born on April 18, 1947 in New York City and died November 30, 1997. She was a postmodernist, sex-positive feminist writer. Naturally, much for her writing was influenced by this. This novel is about a women who travels through time. She journeys through American history to the final days of the Nixon administration, passing on the way through a New York reminiscent of pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg and a brutally defamiliarized contemporary London. Here transvestites who might play at being Nazis and beautiful she-males enact the rituals of courtly love.

This plot just kind of goes over my head. I can't see myself reading a book like this, not because of the content, but because the tools the author uses to get her point across make no sense to me. It seems like more of an abstract essay than a novel.