“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. 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 … From page to page, this beloved woman [Hens’ mother] is glimpsed only partially. All around her there are silences, empty places, held breaths—an extraordinary act of literary finesse … [a] dark, lovely, funny book.”
–Joan Acocella, The New Yorker, January 9, 2017
Read more of Joan’s reviews here
