![]() ![]() ![]() All around her there are silences, empty places, held breaths-an extraordinary act of literary finesse. He never tells us what she died of, though there are hints that she committed suicide: “She succumbed to her own melancholy.” From page to page, this beloved woman is glimpsed only partially. By the time Gregor was eighteen, she was dead. It seems probable that the mother was getting worse. Then you were locked in a closet.) He says that he never knew why he was sent away from home, but his brothers were shipped off, too. (If you committed a misdeed, you had to ask for punishment. Also, is it customary for German mothers to teach their five-year-old children to smoke? At the age of ten, Gregor was dispatched to a boarding school of truly Dickensian awfulness. Gregor grieves for her, but this does not prevent him from letting us know, in small ways, the difficulties her illness created for her sons. When she was better, she smoked less and read loftier literature: Musil, Mann, Joseph Roth. When she was doing badly, she read romances, lots of them, and smoked heavily. This is a tender scene-he allows himself to cherish the little boy as she did (“I stretched my arms up into the air”)-but as the book progresses the mother turns out to be a mixed business. I stretched my arms up into the air, she pulled the jumper over my head, then stroked the hair from my forehead. She turned on the light, got me the checked shirt I’d been wearing during the day, went to the wardrobe smiling silently to herself and pulled out the thickest jumper she could find. When my mother came to wake me I was already standing in the middle of the room putting my trousers on in the dark. He agreed, and from nine to eleven-thirty he lay in bed wide awake, rigid with excitement: She insisted that he take a nap before the fireworks. Hens had to work on her for months to get permission to stay up for the New Year’s Eve festivities. “Nicotine” is much shorter, only a hundred and fifty-seven pages, but Hens uses a similar alchemy to transform the things of his world-the family in which he grew up, in Cologne his former home in Columbus, where he taught German literature at Ohio State his apartment in Berlin, where he lives with his wife, and produces novels and translations-into whole relay stations of poetic force, humming and sparking and chugging. People will connect his book with Aldous Huxley’s “Doors of Perception,” and I’m sure Hens had that volume in mind, but if “Nicotine” has a literary progenitor I would say that it is “In Search of Lost Time,” in which Proust made the material of seven volumes bloom out of one French cookie dunked in a cup of tea. In any case, it is by association with nicotine that Hens shows us what he wants us to know about his life. ![]() How nice: to have the emergence of one’s self marked by a rocket exploding! And, because he is a writer, he sees this birth of a story as the birth of his personality. In his mind, the entire episode-the coughing fit, his mother’s blue hat, his almost uncontainable pride in the fact that he, not his brothers, detonated the first rocket-comes together into a story, the first memory he has that is a story rather than just an image or a sensation. It also, he believes, gave him the beginnings of a personality: “I became myself for the first time.” He means this literally. “You have to take a drag on it, my mother said out of the half-darkness.” He took a drag, the ember glowed again, and the child suffered a near-collapse from coughing and joy.Īs Hens tells us in his memoir, “Nicotine” (Other translated from the German by Jen Calleja), this experience eventually landed him with a decades-long addiction to nicotine. Then he saw that the cigarette’s ember had ceased to glow. Frau Hens finally lost patience: “She pulled out a cigarette, lit it and held it out to me.” Little Gregor took this wonderful thing and held it to the fuse of one of the rockets, which shot into the sky. But they couldn’t light the fuses, because Gregor’s two older brothers were fighting over the lighter. It was New Year’s Eve, and the Hens family, like many Germans, were out in the snow setting up fireworks. The German writer Gregor Hens smoked his first cigarette when he was five. Photograph by Horacio Salinas for The New Yorker In a memoir by the German writer Gregor Hens, smoking provides a vehicle for a story of domestic and national trauma. ![]()
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