false 0 0 false false Fri Jan 04 08:53:28 -0800 2008 Fri Jan 04 08:53:28 -0800 2008
The premise is that Klein analyzed the famous quitting-smoking novel, Confessions of Zeno by Italo Svevo, and concluded that the anti-smoking message in that book and in the modern world in general were linked to a modern fixation with being healthy. Svevo's book discussed that living itself was a sort of illness that could only be cured by death, and that taken in that light cigarettes were, to a certain extent, curative. Klein took that idea and using a thorough analysis of years of smoking representations and imagery argued that we smoke (and cannot quit smoking) with full knowledge of and often on some level knowing it is bad for us - and that if it were not bad for us, the sublime, flirting with death attraction would be lost and it would be much easier to quit.

There's a lot of photography and film close analysis; because of the era in which those media developed and because the way in which those media supports Klein's argument, but analysis of smoking in other media are not as well covered. Nevertheless the idea is pretty fascinating and original. Klein wrote this book while trying to quit smoking to help him sucessfully quit, and I've read in articles that it actually worked. ]]>