ABOUT THE
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ABOUT THE
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The Last Smoker on Earth... and the End of Literature
By Basil Dillon-Malone
All great writers in history were smokers but now smoking had been banned globally effective New Year’s Day 2009. The Act of Cessation was launched during the transition between the Bush and Obama administrations with dire implications because of the rampant rumor of Obama being a closet-smoker. This book is a parody about a brilliant writer who lives two lives – one in the media industry interfacing with celebrities, a number of whom make cameo appearances. The other is his secret life as the last smoker on earth. Facilitated by nicotine stimulation, the protagonist is on a mission to return literature to society as a closet-smoker, writing the great American novel in his surreptitious sojourns to the underground. If apprehended by the anti-tobacco police he will be incarcerated in a place called the Midnight Express and never heard from again. |
REVIEWSWhat readers are saying about
The Last Smoker on Earth... |
The Last Smoker is set in a fictional world in which smoking has been banned globally. The Act of Cessation was launched during the transition between the Bush and Obama administrations with dire implications because of the rampant rumor of Obama being a closet cigarette-smoker.
The novel uses tobacco as a metaphor for the dwindling interest in reading and literature today especially by [millennials]. It’s a satire about climate change, lung cancer, obesity, information overload and economic collapse. The book is a parody about a gifted writer who lives two lives — one as the last smoker on earth and one in the media industry interfacing with celebrities, many of whom make cameo appearances. The last smoker relates to such disparate characters as Oliver Stone and Dan Rather, Kelsey Grammer and Glenn Close, John McEnroe and John Waters. —Russ Tarby, Eagle News Online "Basil Dillon-Malone is definitely smoking! Last Smoker is witty, satiric, and entertaining. There are laugh-out-loud moments with savvy social commentary. I don't know why but it reminds me of something I recently read by George Burns--"It only takes one drink to get me drunk, the trouble is I can't remember if it’s the 13th or the 14th." Anyway, this is a butt-kicking bit of lyrical-satirical prose."
—Patrick Lawler, Assoc Professor SUNY "Last Smoker lends itself less to critical scrutiny than to pure enjoyment. Under the wide umbrella of the overarching thesis--the extinction of nicotine-fueled creative writing with the bureaucratically-mandated abolition of smoking--Basil created a funhouse, richly loaded with puns (trivial and quadrivial), and bristling with myriad references (literary and musical, "serious" and pop, obvious and obscure, scientific and simply playful). The result is a rich, funny, imaginative text that defies genre, but which is reminiscent of a number of works by kindred spirits. I'm thinking of Joyce (stream-of-consciousness); of Don DeLillo (the plethora of pop-references); David Foster Wallace (his "infinite jest," studded with scholarly and pseudo-scholarly "notes"); and, last but hardly least, Dostoevsky's NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND."
—Dr. Patrick Keane (PhD NYU) is Professor Emeritus of English, Francis Fallon Chair, LeMoyne College Basil Dillon-Malone is the true heir to Laurence Sterne, James Joyce, and all the stream of consciousness and experimental writers that he has obviously deeply read, loved, and whose spirits inform this book. It's a wild ride. Visual as well as lyric, it flows quickly and is very light-footed, playful, smart, and funny. Last Smoker will appeal to the attentive reader who is open to nuance, weirdness, and shifting perspective. I particularly liked the ‘succumb’ scene, which could spring straight out of the best parts of the 18th century masterpiece Tristram Shandy. Nicely done, Basil! The ending is delicious! Even with all the smoke!
—Suzanne Mercury In essence, I found the flow and cadence powerful and compelling as relatively continuous text that the eye and mind can follow. Of course, Joyce provided no such guidance whatsoever, and left the reader the enormous task of identifying and deciphering his myriad allusions – Last Smoker is much kinder than that! I was a bit disorientated during the pages preceding Chapter 1 as I wondered “Where is this all leading?”, and I found myself becoming increasingly impatient to get into the book proper and to understand what the heck was going on. As I got into Chapter 1, I gradually started to understand and enjoy the style and structure, the deployment of celeb and pop-culture references, the word plays, and so on.
—Peter Ahern, Head, Axios Foundation I am simply enjoying a freely-flowing "confession" that is-- by its very nature, replete with riffs and admitted non sequiturs-- not susceptible to conventional tonal or grammatical criticism, let alone correction. I take pleasure in what emerges from the pencil and later the laptop of our underground smoker, "confined to writing in the open" (nice paradox), from "the divine milieu" (nice glance at Teilhard) of his abandoned parking-lot. Especially in giving back to society precisely the sort of creative writing the banning of nicotine has almost extinguished. The title notwithstanding, Last Smoker demonstrates that the pronouncement of the death of literature is, like Mark Twain's demise, premature.
—Prof. P. Keane Kafkaesque satire. A bit of ‘Day of the Jackal’ on the New Year’s build-up to the global smoking ban. A piece of ‘Catch 22’ in style and stream-of-consciousness. ‘Abandoned parking lot’ vignettes are lyrical coup de grace sequences. Black humor, absurdist tradition. Phrase at the end of a sentence is the punchline, seemingly an after-thought. Every appropriate cross-reference employed to enhance the satire - from lit to the arts, movies, pop music. On my knees laughing on the interpretation of ‘how difficult it is for a smoker to get into heaven’, and, “time waits for no one except a woman approaching the age of 40’. The author is truly a ‘fighter with a lighter and a writer’. The 2-D presentation of data on an overhead projector. Closet-smoker Barack Obama’s ‘missing 6-minutes’ (the time it takes to smoke a single cigarette)’. Trendy Jay Leno and Norman Mailer style and sweep.
—HM I've staggered to the end of Last Smoker, or the various ends, including the Afterlife and the epilogues and glossary. This seems never "to run out of foolscap," or of "words," many of which "pound on the conscience," though many more--necessarily, given the chosen technique of thematically-focused yet loose association--swirl and evaporate like, well, smoke. The associative stream-of-consciousness romp is nothing if not encyclopedic, bursting at the allusive seams with references to everything from pop music to high culture to science. To be sure, the main theme is omnipresent, but it's the plot or scaffolding which provides the trellis, exfoliating with any number of plants, familiar and exotic. The book is at once sui generis AND aligned with literary parallels. I was reminded at several points, of Sterne's TRISTRAM SHANDY, where the leaving of blank pages recalled Sterne's pre-modernist Uncle Toby leaving a blank page for the reader to come up with his or her own imaginative picture of the voluptuous Widow Wadman. I was familiar with the "Dichter-17," knowing something about motivational research and about Dichter's “harkening back to the primordial sense of power involved in controlling fire”.
—Reviewer No one's ever written a book quite like this, but it occurs to me that there are a couple of classic precursors in terms of timing. Boccaccio's DECAMERON and Defoe's JOURNAL OF THE PLAGUE YEAR were published during THEIR respective pandemics.
—Reviewer "Irish humor is always the best. Basil Dillon-Malone has always had an amazing sense of humor. He never fails to make me laugh."
—Amazon Reviewer "A tour de force of great literary and sociological import."
—Amazon Reviewer |
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