Since we're about to run smack dab into Christmas I anticipate not being around for a while so I'll leave you with this:
In a normal world you'd think that a story about a jealous wife (read: angry Russian woman!) killing her rival and wounding her husband wouldn't provide wonderful descriptions of absinthe.
This, however, is no normal world. This is a world that drinks absinthe and has a seriously sour view of Russians in the form of
Robert Barr's "Purification".
The story centers around the problems of a poor decadent poet named Eugene Caspilier. He's troubled and for good reason. He's a poet, having a fling with a cute little French model, and married to a Russian. The Russian - Madame Valdoreme - is having none of this. She didn't get to become a successful pastry chef for nothing! Anywho, Eugene and his friend hatch a plan over absinthe that is nothing more than genius--Henri (Eugene's friend) will simply explain to Valdoreme that it's perfectly OK for Eugene to have flings because, well, he's a poet and that's what poets do! Valdoreme will understand completely! What reasonable person wouldn't?
Well, it wouldn't be a thriller of a story if she did simply because since you can't really get too involved in people sitting around having polite conversation and drinking tea so the writer wisely decides to make the "Russian aborigine" be completely unreasonable with her husband's indiscretions. Murder! Explosions! etc. result.
Wacky plot line aside, the story opens in the Café Egalité where Eugene and Henri are prepping and drinking absinthe to these wonderful descriptions:
"He sipped his absinthe slowly, as absinthe should be sipped..."
"Absinthe is not a liquor to be drunk hastily, or even to be talked over too much in the drinking...the absinthe, in return for this thoughtful consideration, spread over them its benign influence, gradually lifting from their minds all care and worry, dispersing the mental clouds that hover over all men at times, thinning the fog until it disappeared, rather than rolling the vapour away, as the warm sun dissipates into invisibility the opaque morning mists, leaving nothing but clear air all around, and a blue sky overhead."
But don't take my word for it...
Merry Christmas everybody!
