Evanston: books that drove me to drink
Evanston: books that drove me to drink
Through books I have learned many things, including initially how to sail, and three have introduced me to my favorite drinks.
I first saw Laphroaig mentioned in one of Dick Francis’ novels twenty or thirty years ago.
Dick Francis is a retired jockey who writes crime novels about the horse racing world so well that I, who have no interest in horses or gambling on them, read and enjoyed several, until I got tired of the formula, as I suspect Mr. Francis has too. I don’t recall in which of his books someone drank Laphroaig, but I’m very glad they did.
I think it was in James Michener’s CENTENNIAL that two fur trappers in the Pacific Northwest enjoyed Lapsang Souchong, which is the Laphroaig of teas. That led me to try some; and Lapsang has been my tea of choice ever since.
The causal relationship between books and drinks has come to mind because I am about to finish reading for the second or third time, Erich Maria Remarque’s 1945 novel, ARCH OF TRIUMPH, in which the two main characters, a German surgeon living illegally in Paris in 1939 and a sometimes actress with whom he is in love, drink calvados, an apple brandy from Normandy.
While most people know only of Remarque’s greatest novel, ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT, he wrote more than a dozen others over a long and successful career.
Many of these center about doomed love affairs in the period between the two parts of what I think history will think of as only one World War.
Considering how tough minded ALL QUITE ON THE WESTERN FRONT is, his later works, including ARCH OF TRIUMPH, have passages that are sentimental and romantic. I like them anyway. Or perhaps even because.
The German doctor in ARCH OF TRIUMPH, who has used many names but at the time of the novel is known as Ravic, is a ghost surgeon for a successful but incompetent French society doctor. He lives in the world of illegal refugees in Paris. Is caught and deported from time to time, only to return with a different name. Has his love affair. Is the friend of a wealthy American woman who is dying of cancer. And happens across a German who tortured him in jail, and whom he is determined to kill.
The novel was published in the United States in 1945, in Germany in 1946, and sold a phenomenal 5,000,000 copies world wide.
By no means is it a great novel; but I have enjoyed rereading it. And tomorrow I will buy a bottle of calvados.
Monday, December 14, 2009