Book Review: "Shaken and Stirred" ed. by Diana Secker Tesdell

Shaken and Stirred is one of the most specific anthologies I've ever read. There's something really odd about reading stories about one particular thing, no matter how niche that topic is. But this anthology is very specifically about drinking and the impacts of alcohol. Some of them are nice and others, not so much so. If you recall this editor, you will remember how good she is at crafting images from the way she includes the stories and which order she puts them in. Which is probably why I'm not going to start at the beginning this time, but just before somewhere in the middle with a very famous story by Edgar Allan Poe.

The Cask of Amontillado is probably my favourite Edgar Allan Poe story ever. It is about a man named Montressor who is trying to get revenge on a man named Fortunato for insulting him. Montressor leads Fortunato (who is drunk as hell) to a cellar which contains the incredible drink 'Amontillado' and it is clear that Fortunato is not doing too well, he's getting sicker and sicker as they descend down the stairs into the depths. Eventually, Montressor chains Fortunato to a wall at the very bottom and no matter how much the latter calls out, there really isn't anything Montressor does to stop himself from this murder plan. He walls Fortunato up alive inside the catacombs and then moves a pile of bones in front to hide the wall. The story is revealed to be told fifty years' (at least) later. It is a wicked way to split the anthology where we can definitely see that Tesdell knew exactly how she wanted the reader to feel.

A story that I find veers off the beaten path but with the same level of conceptual darkness as The Cask of Amontillado is a story contained within by Mark Twain. This story is called The Story of the Old Ram. He hears a fellow man tell a story about his grandfather's old ram. This man telling the story is very clearly drunk and begins the interesting narrative with his grandfather buying a ram from Illinois. After this, the man goes into a load of different narratives, not really returning to the one about the ram because of his drunkeness. By the end of the story, the man listening to the story doesn't feel like he's got what he had been promised and doesn't know whether he has been listening to a man telling the truth or simply a man rambling for no reason. The story is funny yes, but the unfinished nature of the story in itself is a brilliant extended metaphor for life in which if you waste your time with people who cannot give you want you have asked of them, then you are wasting your time. You just won't know it before it is too late.

Another story I liked in this anthology (which I also enjoyed the last time I read the book) was called Wine and it was by Doris Lessing, the author of The Golden Notebook. It's about a man and a woman who sit together and drink wine and underneath their romantic relationship lies some stuff that perhaps they didn't want to simply blurt out to each other. The man states that at one point, he almost cheated on his beloved and believes that the 'almost' instead of the 'did' would make her feel better, but it doesn't. It simply makes her angry. The story keeps going, the wine representing the requirement for reconciliation that doesn't really happen the way the man intended. Doris Lessing writes this story without the romanticism of love or wine, but instead with the raw bitterness of what a relationship is really like when you learn something you perhaps didn't really want to know. The fall between knowing that your beloved turned down a possible new romance and the fact that they have only just told you is probably not going to sit well all at once. Including this story definitely shows us a different side to the symbolism of wine and togetherness.

All in all, when we look at the stories in this anthology we get a lovely taste of everything. From Vladimir Nabokov and John Cheever as well, we get a flavour of all different representations of alcohol and intoxication. It really is a brilliant anthology.