Absinthe:
History in a Bottle
Review
by : Li
Rapkin
Written
by : Barnaby Conrad III
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I must
admit, first of all, that I probably wouldn't have picked
up this book if I hadn't seen Moulin Rouge. Something about
the Absinthe Fairy caught my imagination, though, and when
I saw Absinthe: History in a Bottle, I couldn't resist it.
I had no idea that the "Green Fairy" had been such a popular
and controversial figure.
If you're
not familiar with absinthe, it's a high-proof, minty, licorice-y
liqueur flavored with herbal extracts, including wormwood.
Wormwood is supposedly what gives absinthe its kick; it's
a ketone attributed with mild hallucinogenic qualities. It
was the preferred alcoholic beverage of the bohemian crowd
in France, in the decades leading up to the turn of the 20th
century. Absinthe was also the most vilified recreational
chemical in 1900's Europe.
Conrad's
book starts out with the story of an "absinthe murder" in
Switzerland. If you replaced the word "absinthe" with, say,
"marijuana", it could almost read like a modern anti-drug
case. Never mind that the murderer had consumed several liters
of wine and brandy; it was those two glasses of absinthe that
had driven him to murder. This incident became the poster
child for a near pan-European ban on absinthe that is still
in force today. (Absinthe is legal in Spain, and according
to Barnaby, a good percentage of the Swiss are still producing
it illegally.) Absinthe was accused of everything but the
fall of Rome in a time when street drugs we know well today-heroin,
cocaine, morphine-were not only legal, but so fashionable
among the artistic crowd that jewelers created decorative
silver and gold syringes.
From Switzerland,
we move on to an art-history tour of café society. Barnaby's
smooth prose leads us through a who's who of fin de siecle
Paris-mostly painters and poets known for painting absinthe-drinkers,
being absinthe-drinkers, or most commonly, both. Almost any
Impressionist painter you care to name has at least one picture
with some variation of "Absinthe Drinker" as a title. There's
also a great deal of absinthe poetry included in the book,
alongside the sordid details of the poets' lives. Barnaby
has included many color illustrations of these paintings,
as well as reproductions of absinthe advertisements, anti-absinthe
drawings and tracts, and photographs of those people he discusses.
The book
then goes on to put absinthe in a political and historical
context with French anti-Semitism and the infamous Dreyfuss
case. The author's account of contemporary French political
wranglings over absinthe is an eerie precursor of the current
American debate about tobacco-the public health problem versus
the huge amount of tax money collected on a semi-controlled
substance.
Overall,
Absinthe: History in a Bottle, is a serious-though
hardly sober-look at one of the many chapters in the history
of controlled substances. It is neither long nor detailed,
but it does provide a good overview. Its greatest success
is putting absinthe into the context of pre-World War I history
from an artistic, social, and political perspective.
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