SOURCE: "Holy Smoke: Anatomy of a Vice," in World Literature Today, Vol. 61, No. 4, Autumn, 1978, pp. 590-93.

In the following essay, Nelson explores Cabrera Infante's application of a "menippean" form of satire in Holy Smoke.

An ongoing controversy has been brewing regarding Guillermo Cabrera Infante's outrageously inventive and irreverent writing, from Un oficio del siglo XX (A Twentieth-Century Job; 1963) up to the present, as to whether a given work is an autobiography, a novel, a satire, a collection of fragments, or just a book. With the publication of Holy Smoke, a humorous narrative account of the history of tobacco and cigar-smoking and their presence in popular culture, Cabrera Infante guarantees himself a place in the Menippean mainstream along with such venerable offbeat authors as Petronius, Burton, Sterne, and Carroll. The menippea is impossible to define neatly or to categorize—in this respect it is like a cigar's vitola—but...