Holy Smoke
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Very good
Pages: Good
Few pleasures in life carry the mythic weight of a fine cigar, and Holy Smoke by Guillermo Cabrera Infante is the definitive literary monument to that most storied of indulgences. Written in English — a language not native to the Cuban-born author — this sprawling, erudite, and wickedly comic work chronicles the history, culture, and iconography of the cigar, tracing its roots from pre-Columbian Cuba through the golden ages of Hollywood and beyond. Part cultural history, part personal memoir, and part obsessive love letter, the book presents an intoxicating blend of fact, anecdote, and wit, weaving together everything from the tobacco fields of Havana to the silver screen legends who made the cigar an enduring symbol of power and desire. Cabrera Infante, one of the towering figures of 20th-century Latin American literature, brings to Holy Smoke the same pyrotechnic wordplay and encyclopaedic passion that defined his masterwork Three Trapped Tigers. His prose is dense with puns, allusions, and cinematic references, rewarding the attentive reader with layer upon layer of meaning. The result is a book that transcends its subject matter entirely — a meditation on pleasure, mortality, memory, and the art of living — leaving the reader to wonder whether it is truly the cigar, or something far more ineffable, that Cabrera Infante is celebrating.
Author: G. Cabrera Infante
Format: Hardback
Published: 1985, Faber and Faber
Genre: Essays
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Very good
Pages: Good
Few pleasures in life carry the mythic weight of a fine cigar, and Holy Smoke by Guillermo Cabrera Infante is the definitive literary monument to that most storied of indulgences. Written in English — a language not native to the Cuban-born author — this sprawling, erudite, and wickedly comic work chronicles the history, culture, and iconography of the cigar, tracing its roots from pre-Columbian Cuba through the golden ages of Hollywood and beyond. Part cultural history, part personal memoir, and part obsessive love letter, the book presents an intoxicating blend of fact, anecdote, and wit, weaving together everything from the tobacco fields of Havana to the silver screen legends who made the cigar an enduring symbol of power and desire. Cabrera Infante, one of the towering figures of 20th-century Latin American literature, brings to Holy Smoke the same pyrotechnic wordplay and encyclopaedic passion that defined his masterwork Three Trapped Tigers. His prose is dense with puns, allusions, and cinematic references, rewarding the attentive reader with layer upon layer of meaning. The result is a book that transcends its subject matter entirely — a meditation on pleasure, mortality, memory, and the art of living — leaving the reader to wonder whether it is truly the cigar, or something far more ineffable, that Cabrera Infante is celebrating.