Nicotine

by Gregor Hens, Jen Calleja (Translator), Will Self (Foreword)

Written with the passion of an obsessive, Nicotine addresses a life of addiction, from the epiphany of the first drag to the perennial last last cigarette. Reflecting on his experiences as a smoker from a young age, Gregor Hens investigates the irreversible effects of nicotine on thought and patterns of behaviours. He extends the conversation with other smokers to meditations on Mark Twain and Italo Svevo, the nature of habit, the validity of hypnosis, and the most insignificant city in the United States, where he lived for far too long. With comic insight and meticulous precision, Hens deconstructs every facet of the dependency and offers a brilliant disquisition on the psychopathology of addiction.

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, German Literature, Essays, Biography, Autobiography, Psychology

157 pages, Paperback

First published March 3, 2011

Reviews

[Trish · Rating 5 out of 5]

The story Hens tells of his struggle with nicotine addiction sometimes makes us laugh, though of course addiction is anything but funny. And he had it bad, real bad. The time he spends detailing his addiction is time he still indulges, for a little while, his obsession with nicotine, a drug which Will Self tells us in the Introduction is like taking an upper and downer at the same time:

"The first few drags after a period of abstinence induced head spin and dry mouth, while a drowsy numbness crept over my extremities. Soon enough this narcotics phase was succeeded by excitation: spit balled in my mouth, my palms itched, my heartbeat accelerated—in my own small and unsophisticated way, staring at the algal scurf on the duck pond, I believed I could achieve something."

Maybe only people that know what he is talking about can laugh at that. But Hens picks up where Self leaves off, his short history of relapses an opportunity to forgive himself and to try to understand what happened physically and psychologically—nicotine is psychoactive—to cause and stoke his need. And to laugh in the face of his addiction is him a kind of fierce refusal to submit: "I’ll write my way out of my addiction by telling its story."

Addiction stories tell us something about humans, plot points on a neuroscience graph. Mikhail Bulgakov wrote a moving monograph of a country doctor suffering from morphine addiction. And I will never forget reading Carolyn Knapp describe her addiction to alcohol, how just the sound of ice against glass would calm her down, as she pictured in her mind a glass, clouded with cold and beaded with condensation. It cheered her up, and took away brain strain. Hens’ addiction was something like that: he enjoyed running into groups of smokers huddled in doorways, imagining that they are smoking on his behalf, for his inner contentment. Sometimes he even nodded to them, until he realized they might think him predatory or odd.

There was a time when everyone seemed to smoke. Hens reminds us what it was like growing up with parents who smoked, in his case chain-smoked in a closed vehicle for hours while he and his brothers clustered in the back seat, wreathed in a dense, noxious cloud. When he reached his destination, he and his brothers would stumble, wooly-headed and thirsty, from the car, exhausted from their journey. Certainly his aunt, who was paid a monthly pension in cigarettes in lieu of cash but who smoked only occasionally, might have had something to do with his parents’, and subsequently his own, cigarette habit.

But his recognition that “my personality is a smoker’s personality” must have come from his early family life, when smoking in secret was a way to both defy his parents and earn their love. How confusing the roots of addiction become when examined closely, and how, ultimately, irrelevant. Whatever the reason, he had to break his love affair with tobacco. He was a connoisseur; tobacco was a hobby, a kind of art, something that gave him pleasure but which became as necessary as eating. He was obsessed, addicted, planning his consumption. His life, his passion for sports, and his lover were suffering.

Every person dealing with addiction experiences it in their own way, and Hens recalls for us several others writers who have explicitly chronicled their nicotine habits, among them Italo Svevo, for whom the last cigarette, which Hens begins to familiarly call “LC,” was always remembered with great intensity and affection, while the relapse cigarette was always the one Hens himself craved: “…the rush of relapsing is a very special gift… a kind of investment that would be paid back five or ten times over.”

Hens also recalls a heavy smoker friend of his who could get on an airplane for a flight of eight or more hours and suffer nary a twinge of desire for the length of the flight: “There’s no point in thinking about something that’s forbidden, he says.” That friend would do well in America, I think, while Hens himself, once forbidden to smoke, can think of nothing else.

Apparently studies done on rats at Duke University by Theodore Slotkin

"confirm that the consumption of nicotine during adolescence leads to permanent neurological and functional changes that cannot be reversed. The changed structures are still detectable even after the (addictive) behavior has been stopped, an effect that is especially pronounced in male animals."

Hens is philosophical about this, unable to say what he could have done even had he known as an adolescent. Hens reminds us every couple of paragraphs that he no longer smokes. It is a thought, a chant, a wish, a dream, an aspiration. It is a fact.

The book has a strangely old-fashioned feel, perhaps because smoking is so long out of fashion now in America, and because of an anecdote about Hens spending a summer in Chungking Mansions in Hong Kong, “filling a pile of notebooks...in just my underpants…which never became the great postcolonial novel I had intended…” Can Chungking Mansions still exist? But Hens’ writing is a little addictive, too, as when he veers delightfully off topic several times, once to relate a cycling accident which involved him waking up, bandaged, in the “reanimation” department of a strange hospital. It freaked him out, understandably.

For anyone who has ever considered writing about a psychological obstacle, addiction, or other obsession, to rid oneself of it, this is a fine example of how one man has managed to make his life larger, richer, and more meaningful than his scourge.

Two terrific reviews of this title have recently been published, one in The New Yorker, and one in the New York Times.

[Meseceva · Rating 4 out of 5]

Zabavne i povremeno setne crtice o nikotinskoj navici (namerno neću reći zavisnosti). Štivo isključivo za pušače, pa makar bili i bivši. Nepušači neće razumeti blaženstvo prvog dima posle višečasovnog leta; oni koji žele da se skinu pa tragaju za načinom kako je Hens uspeo, neće ovde naći nikakvu magičnu formulu, već mogu samo biti razdraženi istinom da ljubav i razmišljanje o cigaretama ostaju celog života.

[Gorkem · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nicotine is an interesting book and frankly I wasn't expecting too much before reading it. It is an autobiographic book and Hens is reflecting his smoking addiction in the sense of his memoire. What I really like it is that smoking metaphor continuously moves on his past life and as a reader I accompany with him.
Fun and worth to read if you are a smoker or have some bold addictions!
Have fun!

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nicotine by Gregor Hens, is a life-long ex-smokers examination of his habit, and how it changed his perceptions and behaviour. It is not a technical text or a self help book, but more a rumination on cigarettes, and the pleasures and perils of nicotine addiction. Hens goes through his life, looking at his first cigarette, and his last. He examines the many places he smoked, and remembers keenly many of the things he was doing while he smoked. Smoking is an interesting addiction. Certainly terrible for you, but very interesting. I have smoked off and on for 10 years now, and just recently relapsed after over a year away. I vividly remember that first smoke after a year away. I got a giddy feeling throughout my body, my arms and legs became numb, and I was immediately very happy. I haven't picked up my habit quite so intensely as I used too, but I constantly worry that I won't be able to stop.

Hens asks some interesting questions. Can one ever truly be done smoking, even if one never smokes again? Hens constantly thinks about smoking. I remember dreaming about it when I stopped last time. I am not sure it ever really leaves you. The smoke lingers I guess. I could wax lyrical about this all day, but I won't. This is an enticing and dangerous book, while also being very helpful. Hens describes vividly the pleasures of smoking, while also nostalgically looking at a long life spent under nicotine's influence. Every page is dripping with it, and reading this book has been challenging, as it has made me want to smoke with great intensity. Even so, since picking up this book, I haven't had a single one. Hens communicates both the upsides and downsides, and for me, his analysis of the way smoking changes you was my biggest takeaway. This is a worthy read for any smoker, ex-smoker, or those interested in addiction. I certainly had a wonderful time reading it.

[Liina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Smoking is disgusting but almost impossible to stop. It is well documented that its addictive power is on par if not greater than that of heroin.

No smoker reallly enjoys smoking, it is mostly just the illusion of the nicotine rush after some abstinence. But cigarettes trick you because they can really feel like everything. They can feel special, and comforting. They can cure your loneliness, celebrate your happiness, make you more sophisticated, connect you with others or contrarily make you an outsider. They can make a glass of wine at the end of the day on a chilly evening feel like the greatest symphony of your own life. And maybe their most important addictive lever is that they create narratives and memories that will always be tied to the act of smoking and we want to recreate those moments. Relive them again and again.

Gregor Hens knows that and more. His memoir on his lifelong relationship with cigarettes is a surprisingly engaging take on addiction, its causes of and how much we really analyze and dissect ours. He states that someone who has been addicted to nicotine will never truly be free of his grip. It doesn't matter whether you have quit or smoke very rarely, you will have the mind of the smoker. This is largely true with any addiction of course. We create our life around our addiction, not the other way around and once the addiction is removed the idea of the life we had - we will never be completely free from it.

I loved reading about his journey which wasn't patronizing nor overly sentimental and also not overly burdened with scientific research and data. He states "It wouldn't hurt anyone if I took a cigarette. I don't need it, I just want it." He never stopped wanting but he did manage to quit and this adds another interesting layer to the book - it is a look to a former life but also to a life that is the same yet rearranged after removing a habit that got everything to revolve around it for years. The situations, agonies, pleasures and automatic thoughts he describes are familiar to anyone who has ever been addicted to nicotine but make an interesting read for those as well who are blissfully ignorant of them.

[Sadegh · Rating 5 out of 5]

I finally picked this up because I thought that after having spent the past two years (and change) not smoking, I was finally over my addiction and could read it without in the process rekindling any latent fires. I now know better. This book is a personal account of a man's history with smoking with an emphasis on the personal. Many more words are devoted to describing the backdrop, the context, the lead-up to, and the aftermath of the act than the smoking itself. From his earliest exposures to nicotine to his latest attempt at quitting, Hens covers basically every aspect of smoking: the reasons, the temptations, the feelings, the resolutions, the last cigarettes, the relapses, the first cigarettes, everything. Hens' essay made me take a close look at my own relationship with smoking more than two years after my last cigarette. I'm arguably more in its grip now than ever before. Not smoking rules over me in a way that smoking never did. I can now clearly see how smoking heavily for years and then giving up the habit has significantly affected my beliefs, behaviors, and actions.

[Rachel Dows · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found this entirely underwhelming. I found the prose pretty unremarkable. Interesting concept, though.

[Tzipora · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 Stars

I don’t think I even need to cop to being a nicotine addict myself to explain why I picked this book up. That’s already obvious, isn’t it? But what you may be wondering is why would anyone write such a book in the first place? Well, Gregor Hens had actually finally quit the habit some months before but was still caught up in and trying to better understand where his addiction, one that had been part of almost his entire life, had come from and just what all it meant to him. There’s a quote from the book that I think sums it up well-

“I’m not looking for a gene. I don’t want more rats to die. I’m looking for images, stories, and sensory aspect of my addiction. I’m also aware it won’t be enough to talk about it. I have to relearn.”

So this isn’t a book that looks at the science of addiction or the endless rat studies that looked at the health effects of nicotine. This book is an ode. An ode to a first love. An ode to vice. An ode to another era, both in the author’s life but also in the world as gradually the whole culture of smoking has changed and shrunk.

Gregor writes poignantly of how connected his memory of smoking is to specific places and times. He grew up with two heavy smoker parents (for me it was just one but it’s still more or less the same, being a child in a cloud of nicotine, we are something like three times more likely to end up picking the habit ourselves, us children of smokers). His siblings smoked. So does mine. He remembers trips and dinners. Beautiful days. Special moments. He wrote about the last time he lit up in a restaurant, hours before a state-wise smoking ban in public places went into effect. I still remember the last smoke I had in a restaurant too. With my father at a Denny’s so we could get those last few smokes in before midnight.

There’s much to relate to if you’ve ever smoked. And it’s a special book in a time when smoking is so hated and smokers so judged (somewhat rightfully, sure. But there’s a judgement and sort of hate smokers get that alcohol users and addicts don’t. There’s more understanding towards other forms of addictions yet nicotine is more addictive than even heroin. As in harder even to kick than any opioid.) So many former smokers I know still love the smell, still miss the taste and the experience. And this is book for all of us. If you get it, you get it. If you don’t well, this one isn’t for you.

I enjoyed this one very much. It read a little like a cigarette itself. Smooth, so easy to take in, the head rush of memory, and maybe a cough or bitter taste along the way -because like any love affair, smoking certainly has its ups and its downs, at some point like love it’s no longer even a choice you make, for better or worse. Reading this one is like huddling together with the rest of your kind, your fellow addicts looking to get their fix, outside a building (or once upon a time, inside), or that flash of relief like when your lighter has died and alas another smoker flashes theirs and comes to your rescue. I think it’s immediately relatable to anyone who ever smoked, especially anyone who ever truly loved to smoke. And much like being part of the building-side tobacco huddle, you feel part of something, something that connects you to all sorts of others and that separates you from anyone who’s never picked up a cigarette, or who never felt the need, the want, the hunger to continually pick them up. Even when you sometimes wish you didn’t. It’s not going to be of any interest to someone who has never smoked or who never missed it after they quit. And that’s somewhat unique for a book, I suppose. Just like smoking itself, I won’t try to sell you on this. You already know if it’s for you or not the moment you look at its cover.

“I learn not through my dealings with a thing, but rather through contemplating my behavior during my dealings with the thing. To contemplate something is to embed oneself into the inner experience that corresponds to a sensory impression, with an image, a scent, a sound, and then spin a thought from it, a story in which there is more than just a spark of truth.”

[Gwen Tolios · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wasn’t sure what to expect about this before reading. It was handed to me at BookCon. It shortness and taking place partly in Germany is what captured my attention initially. But I quickly became enamored with it.

I don't smoke. Probably never will, so I cracked the cover with some trepidation. But saying this book is about an addiction to nicotine is shallow. It's a beautiful thought essay on how Gregor feels about smoking, yes, but it more importantly him trying to understand the experiences he's had in his past.

He's quit, but this book doesn't paint cigarettes in a negative nor nostalgic light. It’s simply an effort to understand himself - not just his smoking habits but all his habits. Why he thinks and does what he does. And it's all done is stunning, stunning prose. (kudos to translator jen calleja)

Now that I'm done, I'm torn between going through to pick out the poignant parts or shoving it in people's faces and saying "read this".

[Mitch · Rating 1 out of 5]

Little here about smoking (except Will Self's excellent introduction). Mostly an opportunity for Hens to recount the petty complaints of his youth (he couldn't go hang gliding at boarding school because he was obligated to use the sailboat stationed at the family vacation home), all the while heaping praise upon himself and scornful contempt on any figure unlucky enough to cross his path. A particularly telling scene involves Hens' disgust and violation at passing through another smoker's cloud of exhalation, without any hint of awareness that surely he committed the same crime against hundreds of others in his smoking life.

You can skip this one.

[Erik Graff · Rating 4 out of 5]

A brief, lyrical meditation on and evocation of the pleasures of smoking as experienced by the author--now an ex-smoker--during the course of his life in Europe and the United States. Also, occasionally, a consideration of the powers of addiction and of the will.

Although originally published in German, the quality of the writing, beautifully translated, is so good that one suspects the author had a hand in this English edition.

[Satyajeet · Rating 2 out of 5]

Although the book is short, if you're going through nicotine withdrawal, it'll be a long and tedious read, and you'll find yourself lighting one up.

[jeremy · Rating 4 out of 5]

a slim, yet evocative essayistic memoir, nicotine (nikotin) delves deep into the nature of addiction and all of its ensuing consequences. gregor hens – german writer, translator (vonnegut, lethem, self, packer, leonard cohen, et al.), and former smoker – confronts the lifelong personal draw of tobacco over decades, from his first adolescent cigarettes to his adult longings (he quit many years ago). nicotine isn't a book about cessation, but, instead, a meditation on all of the elements that pertain to one's uncontrollable addiction, the ramifications decades hence, and its alluring attraction which inevitably haunts even so many years later. hens is introspective, candid, and frequently humorous, acknowledging the lifelong effects of his one-time dependency. with personal insights and literary asides (svevo and twain, in particular), nicotine surprises as much as it (perhaps inadvertently) cautions. with an indispensable introduction by will self (about his own habit), hens's nicotine is a valuable, enlightening read for anyone: current, former, and non-smokers alike.

today i'm a healthy non-smoker in my best years, apparently, but no matter where i begin my story, no matter where i scratch the surface, i always alight upon cigarettes, on nicotine, on an addiction that had a hold on me most of the time, for most of my life. whether i actually smoke or not, my personality is a smoker's personality. my story is transfixed by cigarettes, and my body cannot forget what i put it through during those years. the life i led is smoke-screened to such an extent that i have to get very close to even see it. sometime it makes my head spin.

*translated from the german by jen calleja

[Brett Tomich · Rating 2 out of 5]

Underwhelming story on the subject of Nicotine. I was hoping to find the essay more relatable. Seemed as if the author used his years of smoking as an excuse to write a mini-auto. You win some and you lose some. On to the next!

[Rajiv S · Rating 1 out of 5]

Like a metaphor for smoking itself...it looks super sexy and exciting on the surface. But turns out to be self-indulgent and not worth the time.

[cat · Rating 5 out of 5]

Day 22 no nicotine.

I was a smoker for 15 years and never once lit a cigarette the way he describes on the last page... wait.
Oh my god.
He's totally fucking with us... right?



Upon finishing the book, I hurriedly grabbed three lighters from the balcony that have been rained on at various times the past few weeks (still wet from last night's rain it seems; I look past the ashtray that's half filled with a murky black soup of rainwater and ash, though no butts, emptied almost three weeks ago yet remains outside(in case?))—all different sizes, colours and kinds: a small yellow bic (my go-to), a large/normal green bic (they never felt good in the hand), and a translucent green gas lighter from mitre 10, originally purchased with the intention to ignite the unreachable depressed wick in a watermelon-scented candle jar—and a black Clipper adorned with cannabis insignia and the words THINK GREEN across its side, found on the coffee table inside—the balcony lighters' wheels did not roll smoothly enough for my observations...

Now I'm crouched on the floor, the laptop is on the couch next to the lighter. I hold the lighter in my right hand and flick the wheel as I have done thousands of times prior, thoughtlessly, meditatively, restlessly, with and without a cigarette between my lips. Then, imagining the moments preceding the act of smoking itself, I flick the wheel the way he describes: it doesn't feel natural, bringing the flame up to the air-durry like this...! I fumble, I'm fuming now. Is it only unnatural-feeling because I do not feel the sharp intake of smoke against the back of my throat? He must be fucking with us, surely! How cheeky! OR—god forbid, I've never known (noticed?) this alternative way of lighting up! He's right, perhaps I've never truly paid attention...
(Or, perhaps just as likely, I'm feeling intense pangs of nicotine withdrawal and I've worked myself into confusion/obsession!)

Luckily the desire to delay my relapse cigarette is insurmountable. But if it ever happens, that glorious day, I now know how I'll be lighting up.

[Theo Karaeng · Rating 4 out of 5]

nicotine by gregor hens is a thoughtful, beautifully written memoir that explores addiction not just as a physical dependency but as something deeply psychological, emotional, and even cultural.. hens' reflections on smoking are rich with insight and vulnerability, and his writing has a quiet, hypnotic rhythm that pulls you in..
one moment that especially stood out to me was when hens recalls his first cigarette, given to him not by a rebellious friend, but by his own mother.. it's an unexpected and intimate moment that captures the strange, complicated space smoking occupies in his life: a mix of comfort, rebellion, memory, and longing..

[Si · Rating 5 out of 5]

i smoked this book

[Aditya Patil · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book will make even a nonsmoker feel like he's been vicariously smoking his entire life! A superb case study on writer's life with nicotine!

[Adrian Barrientos · Rating 3 out of 5]

Una descripción de la adicción, en todo sentido descriptivo, sin juicio. Creo que mucho nos podemos relacionar con las historias que comenta el autor. No tiene lecciones solo es contar su experiencia, pero eso es lo que lo hace un buen libro. La narrativa al final se vuelve un poco aburrida y tiene áreas en las que se observa la forma ordenada de pensar de su autor, dejaría de ser alemán, y se siente como un libro más técnico. Buen libro en general, desde la perspectiva humana.

[Elizabeth Wright · Rating 2 out of 5]

I just didn't see what everyone else seems to see in this book. Books and people can be like that. On to the next book.

[Elizabeth Kiem · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gorgeous. Read it through once and now need to do it again with a pencil.

[Roger The Penguin · Rating 4 out of 5]

German author Gregor Hens loves smoking. Or rather, as he’ll tell you, he used to love smoking. He still does, but he used to, too; but in his memoir Nicotine, he had quit after several life-long attempts of doing so, as Mark Twain also did when he apparently said the old joke, “Quitting smoking is the easiest thing ever, I should know because I’ve done it hundreds of times.” Removed from his former addiction, Hens looks at the cigarette objectively by taking one home that he bummed from a stranger and dissecting it, literally; he cuts open the cigarette and looks at the tobacco packed inside it and the filter. This act of dissecting is symbolic here for his memoir: he tries to understand how he started smoking, and why, despite the advice of millions of people telling him how bad it is for you, he has found such joy in such a simple act. He’s self-aware enough to understand that what he’s doing isn’t ideal: he unintentionally glorifies such an awful habit even when he’s telling you how bad it is. And the glorification is intentional; by looking upon a cigarette as his object of pure affection and exaltation, he portrays the mindset of an addict, tapping into its psychology in an understated, colloquial, and simple way as to becoming approachable. And by approaching it this way, Gregor Hens looks into the depths of addiction and tries to explain it and understand it just so he can overcome it. And when he overcomes it, he is able to look at smoking objectively and without judgment, wondering just how someone gets into this situation, not just being in it, but also loving it. How do you love something that’s bad for you? This paradox is a fountain for Hens to work out and create some really compelling writing.

Nicotine is a book for those who aren’t just addicted to cigarettes, but for anyone who suffers from any addiction or an addictive personality. With simple and striking language (not to mention humor), Gregor Hens sets up a life-long love affair with his drug of choice in a way that’s personal and almost touching. He views his addiction as a means to approach his life story, since not only everyone in his family smoked, but also his great-aunt was even a cigarette manufacturer. Apparently, it was even a part of the family business. When he poses the question of why people smoke, he uses himself as a guinea pig to understand what’s happening in his mind and body, often employing a genuine wit. The result is a book that’s very funny, the kind of funny that makes you feel like you probably shouldn’t be laughing. But it’s relatable and filled with a genuine sense of reflection, as he comes to the conclusion that even if he never smokes another cigarette for as long as he lives, he’s still an addict at the end of the day.

There’s something almost Proustian in how Hens regards the cigarette, as the smell and act of smoking reminds him of formative moments of his life, his family, and his writing. For Hens, the madeleine is the cigarette. The irony isn’t lost on him that he’s making his memoir out to be “A Life in Cigarettes.” But that’s the thing: he knows there is an inherent absurdity to addiction, and this is an absurdity he brandishes and embraces. Because why not? Rather than go through the vehicle of shame, wouldn’t it be less crazy to look at one’s addiction in the eye and laugh at it? Hens posits that only then could we really overcome it by laughing in its face and not letting us give it any more power. In this sort of bastardized self-help book, he’s made a joy out of highlighting the absurdity of addiction, and also the absurdity of life.

This was a very entertaining read, with a good balance of personal anecdotes, self-reflection, and references to the art and literature that has inspired him. At many points, it hit so close to home for me that I couldn’t help but laugh with him. It’s the kind of memoir that will speak to the inner addict in anyone, for even if it isn’t cigarettes, this inner addict may perhaps exist in all of us.

8/10

[Zak · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nicotine is a rare form of book. A novel length essay, not dissuading a reader from nicotine consumption, nor appealing for it's "supposed" benefits and definitely not treading the SELF-HELP book territories such essays have a chance of falling prey to, but an intriguing personal exploration  of what smoking means to the writer himself.

The essay is witty, assertive, intelligent, delusionally real and relatable.

Gregor Hens is talking about a dirty much glamorised, much beesmirched artform. Which is smoking.

We are offered complex monologues and reflections upon the interior vistas we numb or lose traction of, all explored in the exterior and its juxtaposed sibling of interior mapping, how the experientialism of touch, sensorium forms into mental blockades or rhymes.

The exterior influencing the interior. A concept, a reality, a hypothesis, a much written upon, yet vague area of study in writing. I love the complexities of the id and mind, the psychology of spaces, voids, and inherent, between the gaps, the memory glands aroused by smells, rituals, habits, circumstances, reasonings, exterior witnessing, the assumptions, addictive resonances and mania laced monologueing and excuse-making' are all touched upon superbly. Lit up, per say, inhaled, exhaled and studied. Smoking is reflective. Isolating. All encompassing. That, and can be a shared union and experience shared, not spoken upon, buy silently acknowledged in mere presence and habit and addiction.

The essay loses traction, that being some of its authorial pitter patter Nd resonance and strength of conviction and theory (that and depth) within the last thirty odd pages.

It Elvis's up the side like a poorly lit rollup, sparked/ignited by a toaster grill or stove, as we struggle to remember where the fuck our lighter was, but so much in damned need to suck on this paper stick, we will do anything. It can be saved or neglected, and this how the last thirty pages feel. As an ex-smoker (now vaper) this is both annoying and often unalterable. But, bear with it, it can be saved. Which, Gregor Hens does with the final post-script of this novel length essay.
That aside, it's still an exceptional piece of writing.

As an ex-smoker, and one of whom had a creative affinity and ritual setup around his smoking habit, and a strangely warped agenda, delusion, creative routine, with my smoking and coffee drinking habits, that were always aligned with my creativity, and my writing  and  neural pathways, I can totally get behind the ethos, mystique, obsession and lofty notions. As they are not just shared between me myself and I, but between me, myself and Gregor too, and how many other creative types that pose, drag, ritualise and use tobacco as a statement, placement and centre to our egos and selves and art.

A highly recommended read.

[bella gaia · Rating 3 out of 5]

I thought that this book was beautifully and insightfully written, but lacked the clear structure to make for compelling reading.

Hens' autobiographical analysis is beautifully rendered, firstly. His writing is simultaneously dense and heady, and clear and introspective. I even found the interspersal of photographs (which I think can sometimes be an unnecessary addition to text) to improve the texture of the work as a whole. Moreover, I think that through the course of this essay/autobiographical work Hens makes some observations about the nature of addiction that are very acute and insightful. Having never smoked myself, I found the careful and meticulous analysis of the psyche of a smoker that more or less comprises this work to be completely fascinating. This work is both an individual analysis, into Hens' own addiction, how it started and how he has overcome it, and a sociological insight into the state of addiction throughout the twentieth century and into the modern day, as smoking has gone from being an unremarkable, even encouraged, habit, to being something that is socially vilified. This text takes a form that I tend to enjoy in these kinds of autobiographical essay, as it alternates between the remembrance of a significant moment and a more general rumination upon the topic at hand.

And yet, for all that I enjoyed it, this text frustrated me immensely. All that I have just praised it for made itself apparent in the first couple of pages, and then I found that it failed to offer much else. For an essay of this considerable length, I would have expected a more significant development to Hens' overall argument, or even a sense that there was more of a thread holding the text together, but it felt disorganised and loosely comprised to the end. I spent most of the book in anticipation of some revelatory moment - though I'm not sure what I was expecting - that never actually came. In the Afterword, Hens comments very briefly on how he actually stopped smoking and goes on to comment on the value of learning and freeing oneself from seemingly ingrained behaviours, which perhaps would have left the book feeling as though it had more direction had it been explored more wholly in the body of the work itself.

Overall, I thought this book had an immense amount of potential and I did enjoy reading it, but I think that it lacked direction and coherence.

[Nils · Rating 4 out of 5]

A comic and poignant meditation on the psychology of addiction — and particular to the romance of nicotine, unique in the world of drugs in that it entails a thousand microhits a day of dopamine, rather than a continuous experience as with other drugs. Smoking in Hens’s terms is a doomed love affair of dependency — an endless effort to reach the LC (as he calls the many “last cigarettes” he’s had). But the real power of Hens’s narrative is the specificity of place that smoking evokes for him, the nostalgic memory of specific places he smoked. (For me too: the stairwell to the observatory in high school where I got busted for sharing a smoke with an old graduate returned from college; the endless numbers in the sheltered stairwell to the unoccupied building across the street from my place in the City; the ones in the back rows of airplanes to Europe in college; on top of the roof of the family place in Spain, looking out over the garden toward the Mediterranean; the secret nook below the brutalist Moffett library in Berkeley, where I literally blew off the stress of the job and watched the discarded butts pile up for months; or the loading dock behind the building at my first software company, where I shared smokes with the head of engineering, who would eventually become a billionaire from a later venture; or the nasty counterfeit Marlboros I liked to smoke in front of the Beijing Hotel on Chang’an, back when visiting China was possible; or the post-coital ones in Paris, in my fifth floor walk up in the Marais; or the carton of authentic Marlboros purchased in duty free in. San Francisco that I sucked down at the Rockefeller Foundation in Bellagio; or nearby, but twenty-five years earlier, the cigarette I smoked in the greatest downpour in history, in the Piazza Manzoni in Lugano, the cigarette somehow staying lit even as it dissolved in my hands; or the many shared smokes on Julian’s mother’s balcony in St Gallen which, tossed into the next yard, eventually earned him a beating from the fascist neighbor; or, of course, the very first cigarette, aboard Miguel’s fishing boat, that warm July night in 1983, as we waited in vain for the squid to arrive, the one that made me feel ill but also in love for the very first time….) Will Self’s introduction is also brilliant, recounting “the juxtaposition between a diachronic and an episodic sense of self that smoking affords, which makes it so very hard to let go of.” Ah, la Diva Nicotina…

[Sean Goh · Rating 3 out of 5]

A meandering philosophical meditation on the nature of addiction, mainly. Within the stream of consciousness writing lie embedded some pearls of wisdom.

___
"Who knows, whether, if I had given up smoking, I should really have become the strong perfect man I imagined? Perhaps it was this very doubt that bound me to my vice, because life is so much pleasanter if one is able to believe in one's own latent greatness."

"No worries" actually means you are causing me a great inconvenience, but I am letting you off this debt, I'll decide when it's up, don't forget I am benevolent and charitable.

The visual warning of the cork-brown paper that covers the last millimeters of the strands of tobacco prevent the smoker from burning the paper down to the filter. It's incredible how well it works.

[On not permitting himself to give in to temptation even once] The difference between smoking and running the light is that going through a red light doesn't give me a kick, my brain doesn't reward me for it, which is why I have no interest in repeating the experience.

Self management- a term that represents the ideal of autonomic action: we want to be able to decide ourselves what we do, above all, what we do to ourselves, with our bodies, with our immediate surroundings. It is a legitimate desire, but we have to accept that our bodies don't in fact belong to us. They are not even at our disposal. Under closer scrutiny, the spirit is under complex internal and external constraints, so we can hardly speak of true autonomy. Addiction is what most clearly places this before our eyes.

[Dean · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ah how nice it is to breeze through a short easy read after having just spent months plowing through the thousand page Books of Jacob. My immediate enjoyment of this book may have mostly come from the lack of pressure, namely that where ever the writer decided to go, I could go with him without trepidation - after all, it wouldn’t last too long.

I got some My Struggle vibes from this one. Maybe that just me lumping all the Nordic type authors into one thing, but there is a lot of rather pleasant navel-gazing that the two books share. I’m a real sucker for short books on a very specific topic (bonus points if the title is a single noun, I’m thinking of John McPhee’s Oranges for instance) and this one lives up to all the promise of the form, whose chief virtue is the longitude it gives to zoom in and out at will while maintaining concrete locus that’s easy to return to if you get lost in the weeds of abstraction and introspection. One thing I’m wary of when reading stuff like this though is when the author feels the need to insert factoids or research where it’s just not necessary. I just think it’s really difficult to pull that off without it sounding like an undergrad creative writing class. Hens lost points with me cuz he not only did this, but in the “postscript” verged into quasi motivational/self help territory (he suggests trying to write with our opposite hand for a few days 🙄).

[dejah_thoris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Disclaimer: I was given a free copy of this book.

This is a long essay on what it means to smoke cigarettes and to quit smoking. It's very ruminative and at times interesting. I'm one of the dreaded "chippers" (new term!) though I don't smoke a few cigarettes a day, I can pick up and drop the nicotine habit very easily. This seems doubly strange when you consider both my parents were lifelong smokers, my spouse smokes, and over 50% of the people I associate with smoke. But cigarettes never held any real allure to me except when I was working low-wage jobs and smoking was the only way to get a break without being interrupted. Now, I suck the occasional Blu e-cig when I'm stressed and that's about it.

So, I can't really say if his thoughts on smoking and nicotine resonate with a real smoker or not. I did like his insight on how the behavior links his past and future selves though.

[Travis · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm taken by Hens' explicit refusal of the self-help genre and the triumph narrative of overcoming that so often underwrites typical addiction narratives. It is a memoir that seeks to understand the structures of feeling and thinking that underpin an addiction, and Hens does this with poignant simplicity. At times, the narrative feels disjointed and seemingly without the nuggets of insight you expect him to deliver but Hens never promises a theoretical memoir like Maggie Nelson's Argonauts. But, as his postscript suggests, he hopes to have shed light on the process of self-management even if his account is alien to people who do not smoke or share his addiction. It is Hens' clarity about his relationship to impulse, compulsion, and repetition that make aspects of this memoir truly universal as he hopes it might be.