Oh, and Arthur, that’s The Great Gatsby.
I can’t offer one of my own, I’m afraid, since I don’t have any books with me.
Well, Celyn is of course correct about mine - it’s “Crossing into Poland” from Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry . Lionel Trilling, in an introduction to Babel’s collected fiction, wrote, “No event in the history of Soviet culture is more significant than the career, or, rather, the end of the career, of Isaac Babel.”
… if you care.
So the way I see it, it’s Celyn’s turn.
OK, then, here we go. This is not the opening passage, but it occurs pretty early in the book.
“It is a matter of making little gowns,” he said informatively.
“Little gowns?”
“Yes. When I was born there was a certain policeman present who had the gift of wind-watching. The gift is getting very rare these days . Just after I was born he went outside and examined the colour of the wind that was blowing across the hill. He had a secret bag with him full of certain materials and bottles and he had tailor’s instruments also. He was outside for about ten minutes. When he came in again he had a little gown in his hand and he made my mother put it on me.”
Fun book.
But that can’t be the Great Gatsby. We’re discussing it in English class, and it starts off…well, differently. With the guy’s father telling him that not everyone has had the same advantages as him…either that or I missed a hell of a lot. 
Doesn’t have to be opening lines. I believe that was near the end of The Great Gatsby.
Hint - it has policemen and bicycles in it.
It was the final line of the book.
::bowz:: Thank you.
Um…policemen in it…could it be…
Bah. I’m sort of upset I came in so late in this thread. I might have gotten some of the early ones sigh
So, for now, I wait and hope for something I’ve read, so I can throw my own books in here…
Yes Dyno, we must wait and bide our time. God i’m so pathetic. I consider myself somewhat of a…well, reader, but I haven’t gotten anything remotely right. (Well remotely, but not ACTUALLY.)
Hello, folks, are we still playing,then?
Well, I also came into this game late and I like it, so, in order to move on and get someone else to provide a passage, hints.
This book of which I speak,
policemen in it (not the kind with guns),
bicycles (not important to the plot, but just there throughout the book), and one bicycle is buried in a specially made coffin),
and there’s a sort of mad-philosopher/inventor referred to throughout the book.
The number of policemen is important to guessing the title of the book.
It is by an Irish author, 20th century, now dead) who used several pseudonyms, but this is his best known.
It is a funny book.
Anybody want to guess now?
I used a reference book, so this may be cheating, but it sure doesn’t look like anybody else is leaping at this one…
Flann O’Brien, The Third Policeman?
YES! Winner. Winner. Winner.
Leaping? They are not even strolling, ambling, putting on shoes. Oh well, the fun seems to be in the weird differences in what people think difficult or obvious. I had no idea at all about Jekeira’s “slaughtered horses” thing. Mine is more sort of silly amusement. (Flann O’Brien/Myles Na Gopaleen/Brian O’Nuallain is good at that.)
So, I wonder what you will choose to confound us with. I dread to think what strange recondite stuff a Fretful Porpentine reads.
Well on the bright side, you guys always know what book I’m talking about. No matter how random the passage.
Rats! Zoggie. When I noticed a new reply, I thought we had a new book to play with.
Sorry Celyn, been searching for a suitable text. So it’s recondite you want? OK, have at it…
(One word censored, as it would make things entirely too easy.)
"Lord Byron conjectures that it may be as painful to be born as to die. That seems probable; and, during the whole period of diminishing the *****, I had the torments of a man passing out of one mode of existence into another, and liable to the mixed or the alternate pains of birth and death. The issue was not death, but a sort of physical regeneration, and I may add, that ever since, at intervals, I have had a restoration of more than youthful spirits.
"One memorial of my former condition nevertheless remains: my dreams are not calm; the dread swell and agitation of the storm have not wholly subsided; the legions that encamped in them are drawing off, but not departed; my sleep is still tumultuous; and, like the gates of Paradise to our first parents when looking off from afar, it is still (in the tremendous line of Milton) –
With dreadful faces thronged and fiery arms."
This one word sounds like a hint. It wouldn’t be opium, would it? I am NOT going to go and check. Oddly, it may be a book that I very nearly used instead of The Third Policeman, but it may be entirely different.
Celyn and I seem to have had the same thought. This is a wild, stab-in-the-dark guess: Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, a book I have heard about but never read. Well?
Oh but now we do have a new one. Sorry to disapoint you. I know i have no clue but I’ll wager a far out guess. That IS allowed. Right? Um…Sigmund Freud. Interpretation of Dreams.
Never read (or heard of) The Third Policeman. But the strange thing was, I was going to guess At Swim-Two-Birds! That’s really odd…