The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Holy Smoke by Guillermo Cabrera Infante
Kent D. Wolf

Guillermo Cabrera Infante. Holy Smoke. Overlook, 1997. 329 pp. $24.95.

A self-professed cigar aficionado, Infante chronicles the history of his first love, tobacco, from its discovery by a skeptical Colombus to its eventual acceptance as a worldwide vice. For the Cuban born author, this book—previously published by Harper and Row—is “an autobiography written with smoke, cigar smoke but also cigarettes and pipes and even snuff.” The term autobiography describes in part Infante’s historical essay as it contains many personal anecdotes relating his lifelong love affair with the cigar. Along with his memoirs, Infante uses the myriad voices of history, literature, music, and especially film to tell the cigar’s tale.
A true cinephile, Infante utilizes even the most obscure moments in cinematic history to explain the manners and customs of smoking. His attention to detail will make you want to view your favorite movies in a different light. Clint Eastwood, for instance, is revealed not only to have extremely poor taste in cigars but also to have exhibited bad smoking technique (his spaghetti westerns are a prime example). Marlene Dietrich maintained a permanent smoky aura about her with an ever-present lit cigarette; cigarettes were an extension of her persona, and as Infante quips, probably contributed to her emphysmatic screen presence in Shanghai Express.
Infante also reserves his humor for his political views. As an exile, he often channels his acerbity toward Castro, portraying him as an imposing cigar hog who leaves behind him a trail of barely smoked stogies. Rationalizing his disdain for Cuban cigars, Infante explains, “It would be as if a German Jew, in 1933, bought sauerkraut from Hitler.”
Humorous and opinionated, Infante is one of the most inventive Spanish-language authors currently writing (incidentally, he wrote this in English, demonstrating a stunning eloquence and a wily Wildean wit that would put virtually any native English speaker to shame). Engaged in constant wordplay, his prose has a certain vaudevillian quality—sometimes bordering on cliché—reminiscent of Groucho Marx, who, by the way, makes an appearance here. [Kent D. Wolf]