The First Thing Smoking

By Nelson Eubanks

Book Overview

In dazzling, jazzlike prose that pulses with the rhythm of the street, Nelson Eubanks traces the influences on and evolution of Maceo, from impressionable adolescent to twentysomething man--each... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0345451791
• ISBN13: 9780345451798
• Release Date: June 2004
• Publisher: One World/Ballantine
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.0" x 0.6" x 5.2"

Customer Reviews

The Stowaway

Nelson Eubanks composed a symphony with his collection of short stories entitled THE FIRST THING SMOKING. Filled with the sweet melodies, melancholy movements, and cacophonies that a recurring main character experiences throughout his life, this work takes fiction to new heights with its innovative prose, enthralling plots, and engaging characterizations.Set in venues from New York to Brazil, THE FIRST THING SMOKING's central character Maceo is a protagonist with whom I could sympathize with, gape at, and learn to love. The stories chronicle his life from a young child in New York, to an adolescent at his aunt's rural home, to a grown man in Brazil. Injected between these stories of Maceo are short two page reflections on subjects such as young girls in Brazil being auctioned off to the highest bidder.Eubanks' writing style is inventive and captivating; he uses short, sharp sentences for emphasis and effect. The delicious combination of the writing and the stories made THE FIRST THING SMOKING a bewitching experience that I would recommend to all readers.Reviewed by CandaceKof The RAWSISTAZ Reviewers

Haunting stories from a powerful voice

This engrossing collection of stories and vignettes really impressed me. The voice, which develops along with the narrator, becoming more serpentine and mature as the book goes on, is genuinely new and powerful. Eubanks has a great sense of the rhythms of language, and how they can be used to evoke mood and convey thought. This is emotionally complex material, full of love and guilt, repressed anguish and tempered joy. It's exciting to come across a new writer whose work I know I will always look forward to.

17 good stories in an urbane setting...discover a new author

Short stories and vignettes if told poignantly to express a longing for more should be the barometer in measuring what impact it would have on the reader. Some can be told in voices that would garner explicit awareness, where some may be as abstract as any unfeeling sense of detachment it would evoke. I read Nelson Eubanks' The First Thing Smoking with mixed emotion, but came away impressed with how the stories were told. The tone and tenor suggests an interconnection based on them set in the urban pathos of New York City and Brazil. As such, they are intractably told through the trials and tribulation of Maceo Watson, an impressionable adolescent expressive and vibrant in his quest for identity. These 17 stories are metaphoric in a street-wise interpretive analogy where the prejudice and hatred that exist within the familial order emphasizes the variance of skin pigmentation as it pertain to miscegenative value. Let's set the stage for the book for a better understanding of Maceo and his predicament. The urbane setting is relative to the New York/New Jersey locale, flavoring his demeanor and shaping his ideological mind as he looks within himself in attempting to understand his racial background. His father looks "mostly white" and his mother is "the color of coffee with lots of milk in it." As the author laments. Maceo himself is darker than either of his parents, which causes his great-aunt Inola to ponder his fate and urge him to be wary of the sun and the harm it can do. Shuttling between his mixed-race neighborhood and white-kid private school, Maceo tries to fit in both places....often failing in both. There's a lot at work here: exploring self-identity for racial awareness, familial angst, and the ramification of sexual politics amid backdrops conducive to prejudice and hatred when the color issue is not addressed adequately. Eubanks deftly switches scenarios to give authenticity to setting, and to allow the reader good observation into Maceo's dilemma. Throughout, there are adjunct characters that give supportive weight to add balance, but at times there's bouts of ennui. The brief vignettes, with a Brazilian flavor tend to be shallow as the author fails to give deeper coloration which gives a less effective realism as opposed to the longer narrative pieces set in New York. I wanted to identify with the author's subjectiveness but felt lost in a few of his stories, namely "Novo Tiempo", "Impromptu Parade", and "A Lie in Seven Parts". I love the Brazilian culture and found a sense of contentment following Maceo's wanderings through Bahia to be enlightening. Eubanks's adaptation of race, skin color, and a young man coming of age in spite of it gives The First Thing Smoking reason to be read....if not for other substantive ways to look at how race can be dealt with through the eyes of others. As I read on, I marveled at how the author was able to blend rich kaleidoscopes to make this work of fiction possess a style of its own.