Beautiful Losers by Leonard Cohen

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Original Title: Beautiful Losers

ISBN: 0679748253
ISBN13: 9780679748250
Autor: Leonard Cohen
Rating: 4.3 of 5 stars (567) counts
Original Format: Paperback, 243 pages
Download Format: PDF, TXT, ePub, iBook.
Published: November 2nd 1993 / by Vintage / (first published 1966)
Language: English
Genre(s):
Cultural >Canada- 68 users
Fiction- 50 users
Poetry- 37 users
Literature- 29 users
Novels- 23 users
Literature >Canadian Literature- 18 users

Description:

One of the best-known experimental novels of the 1960s, Beautiful Losers is Cohen s most
defiant and uninhibited work. The novel centres upon the hapless members of a love triangle
united by their sexual obsessions and by their fascination with Catherine Tekakwitha, the 17th-
century Mohawk saint.

By turns vulgar, rhapsodic, and viciously witty, Beautiful Losers explores each characters
attainment of a state of self-abandonment, in which the sensualist cannot be distinguished from
the saint.

About Author:

Leonard Norman Cohen was a Canadian singer-songwriter, poet and novelist. Cohen published
his first book of poetry in Montreal in 1956 and his first novel in 1963.
Cohen's earliest songs (many of which appeared on the 1968 album Songs of Leonard Cohen)
were rooted in European folk music melodies and instrumentation, sung in a high baritone. The
1970s were a musically restless period in which his influences broadened to encompass pop,
cabaret, and world music. Since the 1980s he has typically sung in lower registers (bass baritone,
sometimes bass), with accompaniment from electronic synthesizers and female backing singers.
His work often explores the themes of religion, isolation, sexuality, and complex interpersonal
relationships.
Cohen's songs and poetry have influenced many other singer-songwriters, and more than a
thousand renditions of his work have been recorded. He has been inducted into the Canadian
Music Hall of Fame and the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame and is also a Companion of the
Order of Canada, the nation's highest civilian honour. Cohen was inducted into the Rock and Roll
Hall of Fame on March 10, 2008 for his status among the "highest and most influential echelon of
songwriters".

Other Editions:

- Beautiful Losers (Paperback)

- Beautiful Losers (Paperback)

- Beautiful Losers (Paperback)

- Beautiful Losers (Mass Market Paperback)

- Beautiful Losers (Independent Banned Books series #10)

Books By Author:
- Book of Longing

- Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs

- The Favorite Game

- Selected Poems, 1956-1968

 - Let Us Compare Mythologies

Books In The Series:

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- Kamouraska

- Kiss of the Fur Queen

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- Bear

- The Fat Woman Next Door Is Pregnant

- Volkswagen Blues
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- Bottle Rocket Hearts

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- Elle

Rewiews:
Nov 10, 2016
karen
Rated it: it was amazing
Shelves: table, favorites, upstairs-neighbors
worst day ever. thanks for all the everything, l.c.
i have tried to review this book on four separate occasions. for some reason, this is one of the
most diffcult books for me to defend to others and to justify to myself.
on the one hand, it's leonard cohen. enough said.
on the other hand, i can be objective when it comes to him. dear heather is a crap album. there, i
said it. i'm sorry, but the world did not need a 9/11 song from him, it is terrible terrible terrible.
on the other hand, it's leonar
worst day ever. thanks for all the everything, l.c.
i have tried to review this book on four separate occasions. for some reason, this is one of the
most diffcult books for me to defend to others and to justify to myself.
on the one hand, it's leonard cohen. enough said.
on the other hand, i can be objective when it comes to him. dear heather is a crap album. there, i
said it. i'm sorry, but the world did not need a 9/11 song from him, it is terrible terrible terrible.
on the other hand, it's leonard cohen.
you see my plight? as a piece of literature, this has a ton of failings, but the bright spots are
scouring.
leonard cohen has a way with words that can annihilate me. he has a song i cannot even listen to
because it takes everything i hate about myself and puts it to music, and it is an exquisite torture i
can only permit myself when i am in the blackest of moods.
there are portions of this novel that i am in awe of:
it has the most devastating passive-aggressive suicide of all time, and its ultimate failure as a
gesture is more powerful to me than anything i have ever read. this is not a spoiler, because that is
not what the book is about.
so, what is it about? well, it is mishmash catalog of a scholar's griefs, obsessions, betrayals,
recollections, and erotic fascinations. it swerves through time in a way that a more experienced
novelist, someone with greater control over the long-form, could perhaps have turned into
something more successful, but even with all of its flaws, it remains a favorite of mine.
cohen is not a master storyteller. he is a master wordsmith, and many of his songs operate
perfectly well as poetic short stories; chelsea hotel, story of isaac, seems so long ago, nancy, but
even though there are passages here that completely stop my heart,overall this book is an
experimental novel that overextends itself and never becomes a novel, just a series of episodes
that tie together, but doesn't add anything to the canon of great experimental novels.
so, why is it among my favorites?
he may not have the gas to be a master novelist, but as a sprinter, there is no one better with
words.i wanted to include a quotation here, a passage that always makes me stuns me with its
power, but i realized today that the "passage" is actually pages 57-61. and there ain't no way i am
going to type all that out. but just know that he out-lolita's lolita in the "making young girls seem
attractive" sense. nabokov never convinced me to become a humbert, but cohen makes some
good points. more romance novelists should take their cues from his erotic finesse, because he is
the only writer who has ever made me appreciate that words can be very sexy, even if i have no
personal desire to go after little girls.
and with all cohen's work, the erotic is so intertwined with the spiritual, it never reads as tawdry.
maybe not as classy here as some of his other erotic works, but not as grotesque as other writers
with less restraint would come across.
this is a fucking mess of a review. i don't know why i even tried, except i saw this book from across
the room and thought it might be time to actually try to review it. and now that i have written so
much, it seems a shame to just scrap it.
whatever.
let's just call this the ramblings of a lunatic and leave it at that.
144 likes
56 comments

karen
ugh, i know. things are not going well these days...

Nov 12, 2016 05:23PM

Rebecca Askew
This "mess of a review" just might be my favorite review ever!

Jan 09, 2017 05:20AM