| On the counter

How do you drink in books?

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When we sip a cocktail, taste a wine or raise a flûte of champagne, we never remember it, but we are also often making a literary reference.

There are hundreds of famous writers who have dedicated a few lines of one of their masterpieces to drinks, trying their hand at describing a cocktail, wine or liquor. Languid vamps, melancholy and lonely detectives, brilliant secret agents, cops as bloodhounds, neurotic femme fatales are some of the favorite subjects of novelists and who are also remembered precisely because of what they drink in the novels.



Often writers have their characters drink the drinks they themselves love; it is a way of bringing a bit of themselves into the novel, without overdoing the autobiography. Ian Fleming liked Martini Vodka in the variant that includes London Dry Gin, and so he makes his famous 007 secret agent, James Bond, prefer it, and the famous phrase "Shaken not Stirred - shaken not stirred," is probably actually a phrase of the author's.

Georges Simenon makes his celebrated Commissaire Maigret eat and drink whatever he liked, and when the commissar lingers with a liqueur of Alsace sloes, a special Calvados, or more simply a liqueur made at home by some old lady, he is merely recounting the pleasures of his great author.

Tastes in drinking enter the writing of famous novels, in some cases even becoming biographical notes of the protagonists. Thus we remember Philip Marlowe for his Gimlet cocktail, Nero Wolfe for his Tuborg beers, of which he drinks five every day strictly outside meals.

The "alcoholic" writer par excellence, the one who remains famous in the imagination of all of us for his and his characters' drunkenness, is undoubtedly Ernest Hemingway, yet the one who first devoted himself to chronicling the frivolous and "uppity" life of the burgeoning American bourgeoisie of the 1920s was Francis Scott Fitzgerald with his immortal masterpieces: Tender is the Night, Beautiful and Damned, The Great Gatsby. While Fitzgerald treated cocktails as the irreplaceable joyous companions of many evenings and parties, it was Tennessee Williams especially with The Cat on the Hot Tin Roof, who reminded us that alcoholic excess is addictive and depressing, and he, who died an alcoholic, knew this well.



In short, the link between literature and drink is very close, there are writers who like to stop a page of their story in the description of a face, a look or the clothing of the protagonist, others choose different details to represent the character of a character: the recipe of a dish or the description of a drink.

Purists of more cultured literature often consider mystery writers to be B-list writers, however, I like to close this small reflection with a sentence from The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler that in just a few lines manages to tell the story of a place, an atmosphere, a profession, and the character of the character.

"I like to watch the bartender mix the first drink of the evening and set it down in front of me with a folded napkin beside it. I like to enjoy it slowly while the bar is quiet. It's wonderful."

Not bad for a B-list writer.