Nicotine by Gregor Hens

German Non-fiction

Original title – Nikotin

Translator Jen Calleja

Source – review copy

Oh, to live on Sugar Mountain
With the barkers and the colored balloons,
You can’t be twenty on Sugar Mountain
Though you’re thinking that
you’re leaving there too soon,
You’re leaving there too soon.

Now you’re underneath the stairs
And you’re givin’ back some glares
To the people who you met
And it’s your first cigarette.

Neil young mentions that first cigarette in his song Sugar mountain.

Well after Gregor kindly choose five German books of short length last week, I finally get to his book. Gregor Hens is German writer and translator. He has translated books by the Likes of Jonathan Lethem , Rawi Hage and Will Self’s Umbrella, he lives in Berlin . Will Self also did a wonderful forward for this book about his relationship with cigarettes and smoking which inspired my post here .I so pleased that Fitzcarraldo decide to translate this book this is what small press do so well be brave and publish books like this.

I’ve smoked well over a hundred thousand cigarettes in my life and each of those cigarettes meant something to me. I even enjoyed a few of them. I’ve smoked ok, great and terrible cigarettes. I’ve smoked dry moist, aromatic and almost sweet cigarettes, I’ve smoked hastily and other times slowly and with pleasure. I’ve scrounged , stolen and smuggled cigarettes.

I like Gregor have smoke all sort from French, German, Russian and British cigarettes in my time as a smoker.

Well Nicotine was written by Gregor two years after he stopped smoking himself . This book  is an autopsy of a smoker , bu not a dead one .A retrospective of a smokers life, the how, when and where. But h also he expands it out to the wider concept of trying to stop smoking as a person but also the way it has sprung up to a whole raft of stop smoking ideas . The book follows him from his first cigarette ,in fact  even before back to  his family journeys in a car with his family of smokers. Through the packets of cigarettes he has brought in the past. The rituals of smoking that every smoker has. Cigarettes and culture from Twain talking of always trying to give up. Italo Svevo. even to Smoke one of my favourite films. This is a look back at being a smoker.

So why the last cigarette? Why should I smoke it? Why should I enjoy it like Cosini? I’ve already shown how strong I am! If I’m able to renounce a lifetime of any kind of smoking pleasure. Every possible cigarette, if I’ve decided this am sure of it, why not this one too? Why, when I ‘ve already come to terms with this resolution long ago, do i open the rubbish bin in the kitchen and retrieve the half-empty packet that had been thrown away a few minutes ago?

That moment you finally let go, I can’t remember the last one but the days leading up and not feeling well.

I think it is easy to say I connected with this as like Gregor I am now an Ex smoker, not quite two years but ten months is the longest I have ever stopped. I even feel now like Gregor does in the book I can look back at the autopsy of my smoking life from those first cigarettes, to like Gregor packets in fact one of the ones he mentions a few times in the book Peer Export , which is a german brand which has jumbo packet which was smoked by the step father of my ex German girlfriend. This is maybe the first of a new genre the ex smoker works. With smoking becoming a more and more anti social habit, I feel we will see more and more of books like this of writers tackling kicking the habit and their journeys.So if you have ever given a bad habit up or just like well written non fiction this is your book. This is a journey to the heart of nicotine through a blacken lung back up to the clear light of day.

Have you a favourite book involving smoking ?