Reviewstack: Four Book Openings

Norwegian Wood, The Unmapping, Empire's Daughter, and Why Teach?

Book Openings

Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami

The Unmapping by

Denise S. Robbins

Empire’s Daughter by

Marian L Thorpe

Why Teach? by

Peter Shull

Murakami begins with a flight as the context for the memory of a lost love—a fading memory. A love twice lost.

Robbins begins with a city mysteriously losing order, buildings standing out of place, and a woman desperately trying to communicate the location of an injured man.

Thorpe begins with age-old traditions unsettled as the boundaries between Empire and village, man and woman, are broken down and blurred.

Shull begins with a teacher at a school that has forbidden all books and where a student has died—a boy he’d known from the age of eight and who had, in his kindness, made him a better teacher.

These stories present worlds at a point where they’re knocked askew and strange to those who knew them well. Time. The impossible. Politics. Death. Whatever the culprit, we begin after the damage is done, and our protagonist witnesses the damage. In trying to make sense of it for themselves, they help us understand the world that was and the world that is becoming, and we understand the character through the context of change.

Murakami begins his book this way:

"I was 37 then, strapped in my seat as the huge 747 plunged through dense cloud cover on approach to Hamburg Airport."

It’s a metaphor for all these stories, characters dropping out clear altitudes into an occluded confusion on route to wherever they’re going. One proposal for the purpose of a first sentence is to forecast the novel. One might suggest other ways Sylvia Plath accomplished this in The Bell Jar, but I suggest one major foretelling is found in the SPOILER IN FOOTNOTES.¹

“It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.”

The Unmapping by Denise S. Robbins was just released this year by Mareas Books. It’s described as “a character-driven, literary speculative exploration of a city’s descent into chaos and confusion.”²

The city is key, so the book begins:

“Early morning in Manhattan: hushed in blanket of quiet.”

The peace suggests the chaos to come.

Why Teach? by Peter Shull was also just released this year. It positions the characters between the funeral and a night club—between dusk and dawn, between death and life.

“This was a little after eleven o’clock, the night of the funeral, Davis, Garret, and me alone at a table at the back the High Plains Oasis.”

Empire’s Daughter by Marian L. Thorpe can be read as a standalone, but it begins a multi-book saga—eight books, all published and ready to be read. It also begins by introducing the agent of change:

“I was seventeen, the spring Casyn came home.”

Each book, in its own way, with its own focus, forecasting the novel in the first line. Each book introducing us to a story world thrown off-balance by change. Each book drastically different from the others.

And the writing in all of them distresses me with the amount of talent on display. Okay, one of the books is a classic. I accept that, but one of the other three books could have at least been mediocre. When I think of every bad sentence I’ve ever written and every story that failed to grab the reader—

These books grab you, and one of the shared elements between them is that contrast between what should be and what is. It’s as if the character is an arrow, and the book presents the intended target, now burned and destroyed. In each case, the nature of the target reveals the nature of the arrow and suggests a new target will arise.

I’ll be writing more about these books is the coming weeks.

Is it a coincidence though? The shared nature of their beginnings?

The Bell Jar begins not just with a young woman obsessed and sick with the idea of electrocutions, it begins with a young woman who should be having the time of her life, thrust out of a small town, too poor to own a magazine, and into New York, working for one. Only, she’s lost, and she’s miserable.

The world as it should be and the world as it is.

All The Pretty Horses begins with a young man at the death of his grandfather. The ranch is the world as it should be, and when it’s taken away, the young man rides to Mexico, hoping to find it again.

Blood Meridian captures the world as it should be and the world as it is in the absence of the boy’s mother and in the fact that his father was once a teacher, but the boy can neither read nor write.

In The Talented Mr. Ripley, Tom’s being followed and immediately assumes the police are onto him. This is the world that is. His pursuer turns out to be in the rich father of a friend of his who needs someone to bring him home from Europe. The rich man’s life is the world that should be.

Sometimes a character pursues what’s taken from him. Sometimes, what’s taken feeds another kind of hunger.

— Thaddeus Thomas

NOTE: Barring Norwegian Wood, I received copies of the other three books for free. Empire’s Daughter was the first of these as I manage Marian’s Book Funnel account, and I’ve since bought an additional copy of her book in another format.

1. …fact the the main character receives electroshock therapy.

2. From the book’s Goodreads page.