Nicotine

Author(s): Gregor Hens

Psychology | Read our reviews! | Fitzcarraldo Editions

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.

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THOMAS'S REVIEW:
What Thomas de Quincey is to opium, Gregor Hens is to nicotine, the most ordinary of drugs. As what is medically termed a 'never smoker', I was particularly interested in Hens's insights into his own addiction and into the psychosocial fabric of a world deeply penetrated by smoking (one in five New Zealand adults smokes). Hens, no longer a smoker (although, as he points out, “the brain's structure changes once it has become accustomed to the nicotine and these structural changes remain even when the addiction has long been vanquished”), is neither an apologist for smoking nor an activist against it, but rather seeks understanding of the role that addictions of all kinds, but nicotine addiction specifically, play in the lives of addicts and of wider society: “I don't learn through my dealings with the thing, but rather through contemplating my behaviour during my dealings with the thing,” he says. What is the lure of cigarettes, how do they affect the mind of the smoker, and why is it so hard to give them up? “Why are people unable to fulfil a wish when nothing stands between them and the object of their desire?” Whatever your relationship with nicotine, you will find Hens’s rigorous self-examination and ability to recreate the subtleties of his experiences insightful. Here he describes his first smoking experience: “My awareness took on a new, never-before recognised clarity; it was as if a curtain had been pulled back to let in a breeze, a fog bank had been blown away. Before me lay a wide, sharp landscape all the way to the horizon. It was my inner world - my feelings and thoughts - that had taken on distinctive contours that I found beautiful. I felt and saw, perhaps for the first time, a great experiential context. Life was no longer composed of individual moments, of wishes and disappointments, that pass by indiscriminately and in quick succession. I not only saw images, not only heard single words or sentences, but experienced an inner world. I was offered an experience that was narratable for the very first time.” And, of the experience of restarting smoking having given it up: “When I smoke the first cigarette, it is as if I can look inside my own brain, as if I can discover every thought in its formation, every thrill in a neural pathway, every synaptic leap, every seminal feeling developing from my thoughts.” This relationship between chemicals and experience needs to be understood if we are to be truly free not only of indisputably harmful substances such as nicotine but also of the world of social and creative vulnerabilities in which we are immersed and in which substances provide mechanisms of adaption. {THOMAS}

 


Product Information

'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 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, author of The Empathy Exams

Gregor Hens, born in 1965, is a German writer and translator. He has notably translated Will Self, Jonathan Lethem and George Packer into German.

General Fields

  • : 9781910695074
  • : Fitzcarraldo Editions
  • : Fitzcarraldo
  • : January 2016
  • : 195mm X 127mm
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Gregor Hens
  • : Paperback
  • : eng
  • : 834.92