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Nicotine, by Gregor Hens
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By turns philosophical and darkly comic, an ex-smoker's meditation on the nature and consequences of his nearly lifelong addiction
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Written with the passion of an obsessive, Nicotine addresses a lifelong addiction, from the thrill 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 behavior. He extends the conversation with other smokers to meditations on Mark Twain and Italo Svevo, the nature of habit, and the validity of hypnosis. With comic insight and meticulous precision, Hens deconstructs every facet of dependency, offering a brilliant analysis of the psychopathology of addiction.
This is a book about the physical, emotional, and psychological power of nicotine as not only an addictive drug, but also a gateway to memory, a long trail of streetlights in the rearview mirror of a smoker’s life. Cigarettes are sometimes a solace, sometimes a weakness, but always a witness and companion.
This is a meditation, an ode, and a eulogy, one that will be passed hand-to-hand between close friends.
- Sales Rank: #32909 in Books
- Published on: 2017-01-10
- Released on: 2017-01-10
- Original language: English
- Dimensions: 7.70" h x 1.00" w x 5.40" l, 1.25 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 208 pages
Review
“Part memoir, part discourse on the nature of addiction and withdrawal.” —Wall Street Journal
“…part memoir, part philosophical lament…when Nicotine stays dry, earthy and combustible, like a Virginia tobacco blend, it has a lot to say and says it well…[Hens] sees this book as a chance finally to put the urge behind him, to comprehend it, seal it and bury it…Like any author worth reading, Mr. Hens is sometimes best when he goes off-topic, dispatching obiter dicta…His lapidary prose will sometimes put you in mind of the chain-smoking Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard’s…” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times�
“Nicotine is a chronicle of his year overcoming the habit. The book is a slim but plaintive memoria to a lost love — a philosophical meditation on the nature of addiction, the listlessness, the frustration and the sense of grief one feels at the loss of a fix. Its structure is reminiscent of the memoryscapes of W.G. Sebald, including the strange, captionless photographs. This intelligent, literary volume plumbs Mark Twain, Italo Svevo and Van Morrison. But make no mistake: Nicotine isn’t a self-help book. It’s not an anti-smoking screed. Nor is it a love sonnet to tobacco. It’s an honest exposition of the emotional complexity of quitting.” —�The Washington Post�
“In this extended, diaristic essay peppered with Sebaldian photos and the names of forgotten Euro-brands, Hens writes philosophically about his own struggles to break the habit and his memories of a life spent in the long shadow of an extended family of big-league tobacco users. . . Tobacco, labeling, and landscape all combine with a snapshot immediacy, powerful and pleasant, that gives flavor and color to Hens’s discovery of the wider world, in all its variety, and to moments of great personal significance. If it’s hard to communicate to nonsmokers how physically and mentally difficult it is to quit, Hens’s memories of nicotine make it palpable to anyone why, even once you’ve stopped smoking, you’re never quite over it.” —Eric Banks, Director of the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU, �Four Columns
�“…it is by association with nicotine that Hens shows us what he wants us to know about his life. People will connect his book with Aldous Huxley’s “Doors of Perception,” and I’m sure Hens had that volume in mind, but if “Nicotine” has a literary progenitor I would say that it is “In Search of Lost Time,” in which Proust made the material of seven volumes bloom out of one French cookie dunked in a cup of tea. “Nicotine” is much shorter, only a hundred and fifty-seven pages, but Hens uses a similar alchemy to transform the things of his world—the family in which he grew up, in Cologne; his former home in Columbus, where he taught German literature at Ohio State; his apartment in Berlin, where he lives with his wife, and produces novels and translations—into whole relay stations of poetic force, humming and sparking and chugging… —an extraordinary act of literary finesse…[with] tinkling little notes of comedy…his story becomes captivating—laced with a saving irony—by being told through the medium of something as humble as tobacco… The book, too, ends with love and cigarettes…It is a strange combination, love and smoke, but there is a long streak of strangeness in German art—colors you didn’t expect (Caspar David Friedrich, Max Beckmann), Venuses who aren’t pretty (Cranach, Altdorfer)—which nevertheless feels like life… [A] dark, lovely, funny book. ” —New Yorker
“A satisfying wisp of an essay about tobacco, addiction, first cigarettes, last cigarettes, breathing, kissing, hypnosis, literature, memory, and marking time… Nicotine is a smoke ring, blown perfectly in a single puff, or — better? — a wafting trail of vapor. Will Self contributes a foreword, a rapid monologue punctuated with vigorous little twists, as though he were grinding out a stub with yellow-stained fingers.” —Harper's
“Nicotine is loosely constructed in short, stream-of-consciousness vignettes. Hens supplements his personal anecdotes by sharing cultural customs related to smoking, especially during his formative years in the 1970s and 1980s. Tidbits of history are woven throughout, including Adolf Hitler's anti-smoking stance and Mark Twain's wit on the subject. The writing is detailed, fluid and sensual. The acute memories he shares about people who have crossed his path are especially appealing; he retells stories about those with whom he's shared smokes, from family members to strangers, and even his attempts to quit, including a visit to an eccentric hypnotist in Columbus, Ohio. Smoking and cigarettes might not be good for the health of the body, but Hens's glimpse through the prism of addiction offers an enriching and enlightening account that benefits the mind and the soul.” —Shelf Awareness
“Nicotine is not another finger-wagging treatise on the evils of smoking. Nor is it a boring, triumphant tale of how one can muster the willpower to dump the cigarettes and replace them with a diet of unpasteurized goat’s milk and raw parsnips. Indeed, in the book’s postscript, Mr. Hens reminds readers that he doesn’t want ‘to persuade you to do anything. . . . Help yourself if you want to, or don’t.’ Instead this is a wonderfully meandering memoir, beautifully written, in which Mr. Hens recalls formative experiences through the experience of smoking—because cigarettes were always present— while also exploring the psychology of an addict. But reading Nicotine made me wonder if, like Mr. Hens, “each one of those cigarettes meant something to me,” even the thousands that I don’t recall smoking. Remembering shared cigarettes with long-forgotten friends, chain-smoking ex-girlfriends, strangers in bars and that one time I smoked on a plane, I suspect he’s right.” �— Wall Street Journal
“Hens’s short book is an idiosyncratic and thought-provoking essay on the grip of nicotine, how it shaped his life, and how it still factors into his life despite having quit smoking decades ago… Hens gives readers an understanding of what it is like to have an addiction, albeit a legal one, and how the end of an addiction can be felt as a loss.”�—Publishers Weekly
“In his unorthodox and candid memoir, German writer and translator Hens discusses his longtime addiction to cigarettes, his eventual recovery, and the ongoing battle with his addictive personality to fight the ever present urge to smoke. . . The author is an idiosyncratic stylist whose sentences are often terse and elliptical, and Calleja's translation ably captures his unique voice. In a book that is as much a paean to smoking as it is a eulogy, Hens is both poetic and unforgiving about the pleasures and pains of smoking.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Every cigarette I’ve ever smoked now seems, in retrospect, like little more than preparation for this remarkable essay—though nothing in me could have anticipated its exquisitely surprising brilliance, the precision and play of its intellect. It’s about smoking, sure, but it’s also about a luminous and nuanced exploration of how we’re constituted by our obsessions, how our memories arrange themselves inside of us, and how—or if—we control our own lives.”�—Leslie Jamison
“Hens endured and he wrote about it, resulting in this excellent personal work on the fetishisation, the ceremony and the compulsions of the smoker. . . Nicotine is a meandering journey through a life of everyday addiction, soaked in memories stained sepia by tobacco smoke. . . The writing is superb, an unclassifiable mix of freeform thought and transcribed memory, reminiscent of the wonderful essayist Geoff Dyer. Its malleable structure, through sheer skill and confidence, allow the many digressions to remain ever valid and precise. . . Insightful and honest.”�—The Skinny
“Elegant, lucid and consistently entertaining.”�—The �Spectator
“In his short, perceptive and thoroughly absorbing memoir,�Nicotine, German author and Ohio State University linguistics professor Gregor Hens differentiates between the putative "last cigarette," the one butted out on New Year's Eve or other such occasion of swearing off for good and the "relapse cigarette," the first one inhaled after a period of going without. And there's no question which of the two has afforded him greater pleasure. Hens leavens his anecdotal recollections with appreciable humour … Prepare to be hooked from the first sentence.”�—�Globe and Mail
“Nicotine is a serious investigation. Hens’ memories — spun as stories, for he is a piquant, enchanting storyteller — follow one after another, though not before they have been surgically dissected for elements of self-discovery lurking in that memory’s cigarette. Will Self’s introduction is a gloriously mad prelude, dragging luxuriously, gratifyingly on tobaccos of ‘Stygian darkness and Samsonian strength,’ which, the nicotine rapidly absorbed, jump-starts the nasty state of withdrawal, ‘and thus mistakes the relief of these symptoms’…While Hens searches for his addiction’s source — genetics, Freudian, exposure — and submits to hypnosis’ trance, he offers flashes of Cigarette Power [and] despite qualms that the last cigarette might extinguish his access to literarily fertile material, Nicotine is proof positive that Hens still has the stuff.”— The San Francisco Chronicle�
“Readers and smokers and especially readers who smoke will be grateful that Mr Hens wrote Nicotine despite the risk of relapse. It is that rare book on addiction: neither preaching nor self-loathing, lapsing only occasionally into romanticism. And like the best cigarettes, it is over too soon.” �— The Economist�
“Cigarettes are an overwrought cultural fixation. There are too many books, essays, movies, and songs about cigarettes. But Nicotine somehow manages to feel fresh in spite of that. Ultimately, it’s a book about longing, and you don’t need to be a current or former smoker to relate to that.” — Aude White, New York Magazine
“One things that sets Nicotine apart from other books of its kind is that, while firmly planted in the realm of memoirs, it deviates from time to time and becomes a narrative about exploring the self, a story about an entire family and their relationship to smoking, and even turns into something akin to investigative journalism when the author looks at the manufacturing and marketing of cigarettes. Throughout all those, the pace is enjoyable, the chapters go by fast, and the writing is always engaging regardless of what the author is discussing at the time. A series of photos that relate to the narrative are sprinkled throughout and add a touch of visual storytelling to the book. Ultimately, Nicotine shines because Hens’ delivers his personal history while also exploring the way humans are shaped by their obsessions. Gritty, funny, multilayered, and rich in diversity of themes explored, this is a memoir that transcends its genre and demands to be read as much more than just a man's look at his lifetime inhaling smoke.” — LitReactor
“Nicotine is a book about cigarettes merely on its surface, but it feels important that Hens opens with the sheer volume he’s smoked to illustrate, if nothing else, how significantly this object is entwined in his past. Hens no longer smokes, but the question now is: what have all these cigarettes meant, and where does he go from here? What makes this story, and other addiction narratives, so captivating is that, according to Hens, they frequently function as often unexpected insights.” �— Kirkus Reviews�
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“Nicotine is nothing like a manual for giving up smoking; it does not berate the smoker or extol the healthy benefits of giving up the habit. It is more like an ode, ironic but poetic, to the eponymous drug that does irreversible damage, yet gives its user a sensation of control and calm, of time-passing and occasion-remembering that is hard to set aside once one has experienced it. While Hens has clearly quit, and notes good reasons for doing so, including the simple ability to choose to do what he wants, he does not condemn the sinner...or the sin.” – BookReporter.com
“Irresistibly humorous, eminently readable and concerned with a contentious issue that continues to be hotly debated,�Nicotine�is the fascinating autobiographical account of one man’s addiction to smoking. Writing with the passion of an obsessive, the author analyses how his addiction has shaped his thought and behaviour patterns in ways that would initially appear to be entirely unrelated to cigarettes.”�—New Books in German
"A passionate attempt to banish the addiction through words."—sf-magazin
"'I don’t smoke any more, but there are always moments when I can think of nothing else but cigarettes. This is one of those moments. I really shouldn’t write this book, it’s much too risky ...'. But Hens needn’t worry that this book might bring him harm; for even if he does start smoking again one day,�Nicotine�may well be his most successful book yet."�—Die Zeit
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"This is not a story about quitting, but an accomplished and unsettling meditation on one’s own addiction."�—Die Zeit
About the Author
Gregor Hens is a German writer and translator. He has translated Will Self, Jonathan Lethem, and George Packer into German.
�
Jen Calleja is a writer, translator, curator, and musician. She has translated�prose�and poetry for Bloomsbury, PEN International, the Austrian Cultural Forum London, and the Goethe-Institut.
Most helpful customer reviews
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
The introduction by Will Self was the best part of this book
By slproctor
The story was well written, but dragged on to long for me. The introduction by Will Self was the best part of this book.
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful.
If you've never smoked, you'll wonder what you've been missing.
By Bookreporter
If you've ever smoked, this lengthy essay on the subject will stir some best and worst memories. If you never have, NICOTINE may make you wonder what you've been missing.
This is German writer Gregor Hens’ self-therapeutic retrospective on his relationship with the demon weed. Though it has been a long time since he had a cigarette, Hens’ recollections are powerful. He smoked because he was glad, because he was sad. He smoked to mark time. He smoked fiercely after short periods of abstinence, as on an airplane trip. Though he never wished to join them, he still feels kinship with the poor souls doomed to smoke in the littered dark alleyways offered to workplace addicts as "designated smoking areas." Born with the habit already fixed in his genetic code from his smoking mother, Hens had his first ciggy when barely out of toddlerhood.
Looking back on the smoking years, Hens is constructing a loosely jointed memoir. Was it his mother's smoking or his cold domineering father who had conquered the habit that most influenced him to rebel with cigarettes? Being sent away to a school where the tiniest infraction could result in what would now be considered abuse, if not downright torture, only made the boy more attached to the wicked habit: "I was the third son returned from boarding school as a heavy smoker." Quitting was a continued subject for self-study but always led back to addiction...until the last time, of course.
Having decided to "write my way out of my addiction," the author examines not just the urge and the act, but the many ingrained habits and behaviors that go with smoking. Despite chronic bronchitis that afflicted him from an early age, he kept smoking. Despite all the scientific evidence about the dangers, he kept smoking. He notes that even the inventor of psychology, Sigmund Freud, could not give up cigars when suffering from mouth cancer. Smoking, Hens asserts (and all smokers would agree), paradoxically offers the sensation of free will, while blocking the exercise of that will when it comes to renunciation. He encounters various therapies and also invents his own--- letting himself deeply crave a cigarette, contemplating its relative harmlessness to himself and others, and finding reasons within himself for not having one.
NICOTINE is nothing like a manual for giving up smoking; it does not berate the smoker or extol the healthy benefits of giving up the habit. It is more like an ode, ironic but poetic, to the eponymous drug that does irreversible damage, yet gives its user a sensation of control and calm, of time-passing and occasion-remembering that is hard to set aside once one has experienced it. While Hens has clearly quit, and notes good reasons for doing so, including the simple ability to choose to do what he wants, he does not condemn the sinner...or the sin. Convinced of the “plasticity” of the human brain, he believes that though we can't unlearn, we can relearn, pasting new patterns over the old, and ends by boldly inviting the reader to light up --- but “more attentively than usual.”
Reviewed by Barbara Bamberger Scott
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Darkly funny memoir of addiction
By BowedBookshelf
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.
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