Cigarettes Are Sublime (Paperback)

~ (Author) "A photographic self-portrait from the 1930s, reproduced in Le Monde (December 17, 1987), pictures the popular French photographer Brassai, standing on the rue Saint-Jacques, shooting..." (more)
Key Phrases: universal token, innumerable cigarettes, last cigarette, Humphrey Bogart, Magnum Photos, Robert Jordan (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Klein's survey of the history of cigarettes and their gestalt of ritual, seduction, contemplation, and danger is fruitful and often surprising. For Native Americans, tobacco was a minor divinity, and smoke a prayer. For writers and artists, smoking has often been part of the creative process. The sharing of cigarettes has long been a gesture of courtship and sensuality, an expression of rebelliousness and bravado, and a balm for the terrors and tragedy of war and other intolerable circumstances. As Klein discusses the representation of cigarettes in literature and film, he also tracks various attitudes toward smoking. He believes the current zealous condemnation goes far beyond matters of health and drifts into issues of personal freedom. But he never denies the fact that smoking cigarettes is bad for you. Of course they're hazardous, that's why they're sublime: they combine pleasure with an "intimation of mortality." Donna Seaman --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Kirkus Reviews

Many people, deciding to quit smoking, go cold turkey; others use nicotine gum or a patch. Klein (French/Cornell), however, has taken a unique approach: the writing of this learned, elegant, and fanciful analysis of--and ``elegy'' for--the cigarette. Smokers smoke not just for the nicotine, contends Klein, but also--perhaps primarily--because cigarettes offer ``a darkly beautiful, inevitably painful pleasure that arises from some intimation of eternity.'' By granting access to this sublimity- -which the author says can transform even one's relationship to time (``cigarettes are fiery batons with which you can summon the future and conduct it'')--smoking becomes a symbolic act, a ``dance'' performed between the smoker, the cigarette, and the world; furthermore, it's only by knowing this dance in all its allure that a smoker can then forsake it. Klein examines smoking's symbolic powers through a wide range of cultural references, from Sartre to Mallarm‚, Bizet's Carmen, and Casablanca. Crucial to his argument is his analysis of the first chapter of Italo Svevo's 1923 novel, The Confessions of Zeno, in which the narrator recalls his life as a series of health-oriented resolutions to quit smoking- -each resolution followed always by another cigarette. It's only when, as an old man, he realizes that he's already healthy--i.e., alive--and that smoking is just one way of life, that he quits. In fact, holds Klein, it's not the dream of health that primarily drives America's current antismoking campaigns; rather, it's moralists' censorship of cigarettes' ``discursive performance,'' which hitherto has ``regularly been linked to strong currents of sexual and political freedom.'' Some might find all this just a smoke screen hiding addiction's raw grip--but, even so, it's a lovely one, full of delightful whirls of logic and puffs of insight; moreover, Klein claims that the writing of it has allowed him to quit, ``definitively.'' (Photographs--not seen) -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 232 pages
• Publisher: Duke University Press (March 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0822316412
• ISBN-13: 978-0822316411
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #174,671 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Book !, March 15, 2000

By A Customer

I can not remember the last time I read such a well written book. Klein is an amazing wordsmith & this book is a treasure in understanding the lure, beauty, and sublime charms which keep 1.4 billion people in the world smoking every day.

11 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A superbly spun, well-researched "In Your Face" to the Nanny State!, June 12, 2007

By	Sophia Bezirganian "Bibliosophy" (NY United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Cigarettes Are Sublime (Hardcover)

In this iconoclastic gem of a book, Klein manages to provide a wonderful tool to those of us readers who resonate with his wonderful voicing of one giant "in your face" to the new and stultifying "Nanny State". This statement summarizes the message of "Cigarettes are Sublime" !
Usually we who chafe at "Big Brother" telling us how to treat our bodies, resort to arguments like: "Well, I want to have the right to smoke on my balcony at work 'dammit'!" Such protest can sound a bit like an adolescent stamping one's foot. Klein however, in this so well-spun book, with its rich historical analysis spanning many cultures, gives us a unique and powerful tool to use, in voicing our protest.
"Cigarettes are Sublime" manages to capture what is the CULTURALLY EMBEDDED power, and perhaps (if you agree with Klein) what is in fact the VALUE, as means of self-expression, of smoking, as a social symbol and act. As the Editorial reviews note, "vices" in general (drinking, playing poker, smoking, eating gloriously at sumptuous tables with friends) are all very powerful "games" or "props" in that very underappreciated arena of how we humans "play" with each other in private life--what mischief we toy with, what message we project to others about our "attitude"; to death, to sex, to an embrace vs rejection of the message (broadcast daily in ominous bulletins from our media),that our bodies are entities vulnerable and besieged by a barrage of "risks" that we must always vigilantly guard against, at any cost, including sacrifice of our bodies as instruments of pleasure and work. In this light, the puff on a cig is not JUST recklessness, but in fact, can give that same royal pleasure that one gets in reveling on one's roof to catch rays, as others , anxiously monitoring the daily published "cancer index" of the sun, huddle indoors.
Seen from this very often ignored angle of pleasure and play and social intercourse, cigarettes--as are so many of our personal habits and messages to others in our myriad relationships--are a sublime pleasure in the playground of life, the very thing that those who cry for quantity of life, ignoring quality of the play, indeed need heed, if life is what they wish to "celebrate".

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Philosophically speaking, "What is a Cigarette?", December 1, 2008

By	G. Merritt (Boulder, CO) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Cigarettes Are Sublime (Hardcover)

"Cigarettes, in fact, are never what they appear to be."

Cigarettes are arguably hazardous to one's health, which is exactly what makes them such a sublime pleasure. They combine pleasure with an "intimation of mortality." As any smoker knows, smoking cigarettes is one of the most sensual experiences in life. Despite the the anti-smoking hysteria and worldwide bans on public smoking, more than one billion people in the world continue to smoke. It is the only new pleasure man has invented in the last 1,800 years. In Cigarettes Are Sublime, Richard Klein addresses the philosophical question: "Qu'est-ce que la Cigarette?" (What is a Cigarette?) (p. 28). For Klein, who wrote this book out of his desire to stop smoking, the allure of the cigarette is "a darkly beautiful, inevitably painful pleasure that arises from some intimation of eternity."

Klein's equally eloquent and provocative treatise on the aesthetics of smoking draws from Sartre, Mallarm, Bizet's Carmen, and the "Humphrey Bogart cigarette" in Casablanca, to chronicle the 1,800-year evolution of the cigarette through history, culture, art, film, literature, music, and philosophy, from its religious inception (smoking as a form of prayer) to smoking as a part of the creative process for writers and artists. Klein believes the current anti-smoking campaign goes beyond health concerns and raises issues of personal freedom. He argues that it is not health concerns that motivate the current anti-smoking hysteria and public smoking bans, but a moralistic censorship of one's sexual and political freedom associated with cigarettes. (For further reading on this point, see Joe Jackson's well reasoned exercise in skepticism, "Smoke, Lies, and The Nanny State:"

www.joejackson.com/pdf/5smokingpdf_jj_smoke_lies.pdf.

Klein's erudite meditation on smoking offers fresh insights into what many of us do ten times a day. Highly recommended.

G. Merritt