Madonna as written by Lawrence Osborne. There is no reason not to love him. His writing is not only engaging, but I dare say moving for the sharp effectiveness of his intelligence. What Calvino wrote about some of his favorite writers, such as Borges, Nabokov and Kawabata, could be repeated verbatim also for Osborne: he contrasts the order of the mind with the complexity of the world.
By now, over the years, his dual nature as a writer has consolidated: a novelist therefore (from «The Ballad of a Little Player» to «In the Dust»), but also an author of reportage (from «The Naked Tourist» to «Bangkok»). «Saints and Drinkers» belongs to this second category, a book (from 2013) just published in Italy, translated by Mariagrazia Gini, by Adelphi, the publisher to whom we owe the meritorious publication of all of Osborne’s works. The subtitle of the book immediately makes the author’s objective clear: «An alcoholic journey in teetotal lands». Osborne’s adventurous reportage takes place in the Islamic world in order to carefully examine «how teetotalers live and discover whether we can learn something from them».
It is a real clash of civilizations that Osborne will make us readers experience, in highlighting the contrast, through alcohol, between East and West, a contrast that is nothing other than the “reflection of two diametrically opposed approaches to life”. Teetotalers and drinkers therefore “forever side by side in a spirit of mutual incomprehension”, champions of paradoxical contrasting values such as temperance and debauchery, continence and dissoluteness.
Here Osborne is hunting for a beer in Surakarta, an Indonesian al-Qaeda stronghold, where a group of students dressed in white, in the shadow of a portrait of Osama bin Laden, will try to convince the writer that alcohol is “a disease of the soul”. But on the border with Syria he will have a very bad time, when he decides to sip a beer inside a restaurant where a Hezbollah bigwig is sitting at a table surrounded by grim bodyguards: “All eyes are fixed on the bubbly Latina with a sort of tough pity, as if my beer and I didn’t really exist”. Or in Lebanon – where drinking is allowed without any fanaticism preventing it – in the Beqa’, where the producers of the Domaine des Tourelles open a bottle of Brun for Osborne, considered by many to be the best Arak in the Middle East. In drinking it, Osborne considers how a spirit can make you feel “out of time, without obscuring the past”: “A certain detachment emerges,” explains Osborne, drinking Brun, “a regenerating impression of distance from ourselves.” And further on, the English writer adds: “It comes from the oldest distillery in the country. Drinking it is not a frivolous or superficial act. It is like entering a church.”
In Muscat, the reader will be enthralled by following Osborne as he toasts the New Year by telling how the search for a bottle of champagne can become arduous and adventurous, all the while, as if that weren’t enough, “his life as a couple experiences unexpected dynamics dictated by forced sobriety.” But the most courageous undertaking is the one Osborne undertakes in Islamabad, where our writer will embark on a reckless cultural adventure: getting drunk “in one of the most dangerous and alcohol-hostile countries on earth.” “Because ultimately,” Osborne concludes, “alcohol is us, our true nature manifesting itself. Repressing it is repressing something we know about ourselves, but that we are unable to enhance or even accept. It’s like having a dance partner to whom we don’t feel comfortable entrusting our wallet.” I don’t know if.
