The Smoking Book

In her enticing second book (after The Scorsese Connection), South African-born Australian writer Stern explores the rituals, economics and cultural role of smoking, and the exquisite hold tobacco takes over those who enjoy it. If Stern had limited herself to the cultural deconstruction at which she is adept, she might have written a work of cultural criticism But instead she links more than 50 often stunning and always intriguing pieces in a m lange of genres, including fiction, memoir, history and criticism. Examining smoking from so many vantages, Stern touches on a number of themes. She offers glimpses of the tobacco trade in the former Rhodesia, where among tobacco farmers smoking was obligatory, almost patriotic, and she describes the tobacco sales rooms in Harare, Zimbabwe, where billions of dollars' worth of tobacco are sold annually. To understand tobacco's role in colonialism, she tells of early explorers' and invaders' forays in Africa, and to analyze smoking's cultural role she dips into Barthes and Derrida as well as opera, art and films. But it is desire that concerns the writer most--from the opening paragraph, where smoke both wakens and dampens the appetites of two lovers, to her vivid description of two girls sneaking the ravishing pleasures of contraband Fanta, condensed milk, dried beef and cigarettes. Desire for a smoke and desire for a lost lover intermingle throughout the book, fading into each other until they are almost indistinguishable, and while Stern's writing is never slack, it is most compelling in these passages. Other writers--notably Richard Klein, in Cigarettes Are Sublime--explore similar territory, but Stern's mix of fiction and memoir puts a new twist on the discussion of the delicious passion, and equally delicious irony, of smoking in a nonsmoking world. (Dec.)