‘Nicotine,’ by Gregor Hens

[...] each one of those cigarettes meant something ... a signal, medication, a stimulant or a sedative, they were a plaything, an accessory, a fetish object, something to help pass the time, a memory aid, a communication tool or an object of meditation.

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” — firing up the next cig — “for the semblance of pleasure.”

Hens’ stories are like immersions into post-post-World War II Germany, so add that particular light and air.

Hens steals a puff, and in that first head rush detects “a living entity within me,” an out-of-body perception of self and well-being.

While Hens searches for his addiction’s source — genetics, Freudian, exposure — and submits to hypnosis’ trance, he offers flashes of Cigarette Power: equipping the heroes of his novels with “distinctive tobacco wares,” like Black Devil brand, or relapsing to enjoy the nicotine “crackling in my brain like a thousand tiny explosions ... this magnificent firework,” even contemplating that “if something bad, something really awful happened, I could start smoking again.”

Despite qualms that the last cigarette might extinguish his access to literarily fertile material, “Nicotine” is proof positive that Hens still has the stuff.