Time to grab a book and get tipsy!
Back by popular demand, Books & Booze, originally a mini-series of sorts here on TNBBC challenges participating authors to make up their own drinks, name and all, or create a drink list for their characters and/or readers using drinks that already exist.
Today, Jonas T Bengtsson celebrates the release of his newest book, A Fairy Tale, with this bookishly boozey blog post of The Red Fairy....
Red Fairy
I usually go to Prague
two or three times a year: to relax, to take long walks, to look at the
beautiful gothic architecture, to get lost and feel a little bit like Kafka and
blame my confusion on the narrow crooked streets which intersect at weird angles
that always throw my poor sense of direction.
But I also love Prague
for its amazing bars. Where you can get drunk on Czech pilsner
for a few euros, or go high life, and drink cucumber sake cocktails in the
local Buddha Bar?
And since my generation
of hipster douchy writers and artists favor Berlin, it hasn’t been spoiled yet.
I was in Prague a
couple of weeks ago, with my girlfriend who is also a writer. She was about to
have her second book published, so the plan was to help her relax: walk around,
and get drunk - the basic preparations for a good book launch. We arrived late
Monday evening. Our driver from the airport told us he had gotten the lead
guitarist from the German rock band Scorpions to stop smoking. They had been
best friends for years.
We had a late dinner,
and afterwards we thought we’d go for a night cap.
We found a bar close
to our hotel. From the outside it looked shut down. I grabbed the door handle;
it opened. The lights were dimmed, the walls were painted red. There was a nice smell of weed in the air, a
good sign that this was a place you could light a cigarette without getting
arrested.
We sat at the bar, we
talked with a young Slovak who worked as a waiter at a medieval themed
restaurant. He spent all day strapped with a sword and yelling at customers. He
loved it.
After a few beers the
bartender leaned over the bar.
“You wanna get fucked
up?” he asked me. Since giving up recreational drugs when I became a father, I
was definitely interested in what he had to offer.
He pulled down a
bottle of green spirit from the shelf: the local absinthe, almost fluorescent,
very high proof and with a lot of wormwood. He put a single ice cube in a tall
drinking glass, pouring one third of absinth in the glass and topping it off with
the local Redbull clone called Semtex. He threw in a maraschino cherry - tada!
I had a few of those.
I felt pretty great. Maybe a bit disappointed that it didn’t quite have the
promised effect on me.
My girlfriend advised
me to at least wait until the next morning to get my forehead tattooed.
When recently asked to
come up with a cocktail that embodies one of the characters in my latest novel,
I thought of this bar, this night, and the drink the bartender had called “the
red fairy.”
The mix of old world
absinthe and something as artificial as generic redbull might serve as a nice
analogy for the father in my novel. A man caught between two worlds, the old
and the new. An anarchist who wouldn’t subscribe to that label, because he
hates ‘isms. A man fleeing from Christianity who believes in angels.
Mix that with the
brutality of modern life, caffeinated and artificially sweet, and something bad
just might happen.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Jonas T. Bengtsson has published two previous novels: his 2005 literary
debut, Amina’s Letters, winner of the Danish Debutant Award and BG Bank First
Book Award; and Submarino, the film adaptation of which took the 2010 Nordic
Council Film Prize. He has also received the P.O. Enquist Literary Prize and was
nominated for the Weekendavisens Literature Prize. He lives in
Copenhagen.
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