Volume 33, Number 8 · May 8, 1986
Puffs
By Josh Rubins
Holy Smoke
by G. Cabrera Infante
Harper and Row, 329 pp., $16.95
By the standards of almost any other writer, G. Cabrera Infante's new history of 'the five-century-old relationship between the European gentleman and his smoke'—cigarettes, pipes, but above all cigars—is freewheeling, ardently frolicsome. Unfettered by chapter divisions or other organizational fiddle-faddle, the Cuban expatriate writer (himself a beatifically complacent cigar smoker) celebrates tobacco in a blithely disjointed monologue: the ramblings of a cheerful Pooh-Bah who is scholar and groupie, poet and stand-up comic and guru, all in one. Sociological musings give way without warning to vaudeville acts and shards of memoir. Movie synopses and condensed literary anthologies are breezily interrupted for sour polemics (anti-Castro, pro-smoking). Indeed, while the book is formally dedicated to the author's father ('who at 84 doesn't smoke yet'), Cabrera Infante tells us that it was a photograph of aloof, anarchic Marcel Duchamp that inspired him, after considerable hesitation, to puff his enjoyment of cigars into a swirl of associations: 'Things are in smoke, art is in the rings.' And an even more prominent guardian angel is Cabrera Infante's favorite Marxist—Groucho, of course, whose sleeping figure (eyes closed but cigar at firm tilt) stretches with passive-aggressive élan around the book jacket of Holy Smoke.
Review, 1800 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |