Famous first lines of great novels as if they were written in Communist Russia
A Tale of Two Cities:
It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of oppression, it was the age of shootings, it was the epoch of Marx, it was the edict of Stalin, it was the season of Lynching, it was the season of Decapitations, it was the spring of attack dogs, it was the (ongoing) winter of despair (and poverty and corruption and shootings and an endless cycle of five year plans that never went anywhere), we had guns in front of us, we were all going direct to Heaven (though none of us would say we believed in such a place to the gulag) we were all going the direct other way--in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
The Crying of Lot 49
One afternoon in one of the three days in the season when the temperature topped 10 C degrees, Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Box-of-Scraps party whose komrade has perhaps too much vodka in the mud-sauce to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the glorious estate of Russia, a Leningrad house locator director who had once misplaced two million rubles of Mother Russia’s Rubles in his time but still had no assets of his own and flawless enough to make the job of cleaning it up all the more important for the cause.
Invisible Man
I am not an invisible man, but one vital to the contribution of the progress of our state, and, yet I am one whose flesh and bone will go missing if I fail.
Watership Down
The primroses didn’t grow again due to the immense cold.
The Great Gatsby
In my younger and less fearful for my life years my father pleaded some advice to me I’ve been remising I didn’t heed ever since.
“Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,” he told me, “just remember don’t, that’s how you get advantages in this country!”
The Old Man and the Sea
He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now bringing in great numbers of fish.
And one if rewritten in the tone of Yakof Smirnoff:
Moby Dick:
In Russia, Ishmael calls you.
It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of oppression, it was the age of shootings, it was the epoch of Marx, it was the edict of Stalin, it was the season of Lynching, it was the season of Decapitations, it was the spring of attack dogs, it was the (ongoing) winter of despair (and poverty and corruption and shootings and an endless cycle of five year plans that never went anywhere), we had guns in front of us, we were all going direct to Heaven (though none of us would say we believed in such a place to the gulag) we were all going the direct other way--in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
The Crying of Lot 49
One afternoon in one of the three days in the season when the temperature topped 10 C degrees, Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Box-of-Scraps party whose komrade has perhaps too much vodka in the mud-sauce to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the glorious estate of Russia, a Leningrad house locator director who had once misplaced two million rubles of Mother Russia’s Rubles in his time but still had no assets of his own and flawless enough to make the job of cleaning it up all the more important for the cause.
Invisible Man
I am not an invisible man, but one vital to the contribution of the progress of our state, and, yet I am one whose flesh and bone will go missing if I fail.
Watership Down
The primroses didn’t grow again due to the immense cold.
The Great Gatsby
In my younger and less fearful for my life years my father pleaded some advice to me I’ve been remising I didn’t heed ever since.
“Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,” he told me, “just remember don’t, that’s how you get advantages in this country!”
The Old Man and the Sea
He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now bringing in great numbers of fish.
And one if rewritten in the tone of Yakof Smirnoff:
Moby Dick:
In Russia, Ishmael calls you.
posted by Indiana at
11:19 AM
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