Beautiful Losers

The title comes from one of his earlier poems, which having a mysterious coda of "So you're the kind of vegetarian/ Who only eats roses/ Is that what you mean't/ with your beautiful losers?". Given that context, this title refers to the cast of incredibly beautiful losers at life's game in this fantastic cruise through Cohen's imagination and a stream of consciousness. I promise, this trip will be quite unlike anything you have ever experienced in print. It revolves around four characters, three of whom are dead, one of whom is a French-Canadian Indian nun who's been dead for over three hundred years, and who's currently being considered for cannonization by the Cathloic Church. From its opening question, "Catherine Tekakawitha, who are you?" to his final plea to "poor men, poor men such as we, they've gone and fled", this is a book that will leave you breathless.

This is one book you should run out to buy, but also is one for a long and slow reading. On virtually every page is a stream of word pictures best experienced fully and deliberately. Don't pick this one for your book report, kids, it is a four letter word tirade, and an exploration into the grittiest aspects of life. it is at turns hilarious, hysterical, profound, mystical, and absolutely unbelievable. For Cohen, "God is alive, and magic is afoot", and nowhere is his power of observation moe powerful than in this novel.

I remember having read it in hardcover in the mid-sixties and then passed it on to a friend, who of course passed it on and so on. So I lost the hardcover forever, but began a life of loving serious and well-written literature. This is a book for the ages, friend, one you can pick up and read a page at random at any moment and still enjoy completely. At the risk of committing the terrible sin of hyperbole, this is a wonderful work of art, and will last for centuries. Read it now, and then read it later. It ages very well. Like "Ulysses", or "Finnegan's Wake', or "Death In Venice", it is a one of a kind experience. Enjoy.


World of Beauty   March 4, 2002
Sebastien Pharand (Orleans, Ontario, Canada)
20 out of 21 found this review helpful

Songwriter/singer/poet/novelist Leonard Cohen is a writer who, through the use of a few words alone, can send a thousand different emotions and images through your head. His writing is powerful and touching, though often too poetic. Beautiful Losers is, in fact, a poem disguised as a novel. It is a postmodernistic work of Canadian fiction that, although beautiful, refuses to make sense.

The story's nameless narrator is scarred by the death of his wife, Edith, and of his best friend, F. As the three were part of a very strange romantic triangle, the posthumous revelations the narrator comes to during the course of the story are highly revealing and often shocking. As he mourns his wife, he cannot hide the fact that he was also in love with F. and his strange view on life.

A historian in disguise, the narrator is also doing research on an Native saint named Catherine, who's story is an echo of the things the narrator has went through and is going through. As these four chracters entertwine, and as more and more painful secrets are revealed, we are forced into a chaotic world where sense does not exist, where order and sanity are always at stake.
A highly poetic effort, Beautiful Losers ins't a book that should be read quickly. Just like the prose, the reader should take his time while reading it. It's too easy to miss the great irony and humour behind all the darkness and sadness of the prose. Cohen created a world where surrealism, sexuality and violence are part of the ordinary, where order seems to fail with a shocking consistancy and where disorder seems to rule.


Cohen's sense of beauty taken to the extreme   October 14, 2002
VoodooLord7 (Oklahoma, USA)
18 out of 19 found this review helpful

"Beautiful Losers" is the perfect title for this book. Though Cohen, of course, has come to be known foremost as a songwriter and secondly as a poet, this novel, his second, came out in 1966, two years before the release of his first album. As anyone who has read his poetry and prose or listened to his songs knows, Cohen is a very gifted man with words. Not since Oscar Wilde and James Joyce have I seen a man who can manipulate the English language and drop little nuggets of beauty among the vast sea of sorrow as well as he can. Cohen's writing style is very smooth and beautiful, and the images he creates are very evocative. To try to imagine how this book reads, think of Cohen's lyrical or poetic style - and then run it on out to Cloud 9. As I said, this book is perfectly titled - it is beauty - indeed, everything - taken the to extreme. The writing is very beautiful and wondrous to read; the review which states that Cohen's style is like "James Joyce... writing from the point of view of Henry Miller", contrary to its apparent surface of hyperbole, is actually highly accurate. People often cite Miller as the predominant writer of erotic material, but I think that Cohen is the true master of the art: he gets to the very heart of the subject. Consequently, this book is very, very vulgar and quite disturbing at times - if it were not for the monumental court decisions on Ulysses and Tropic of Cancer, this book would, no doubt, have never been published in the United States. This is raw, rugged, beautiful prose. As many other reviewers have pointed out, this is really a poem described as a novel - or prose, at any rate. The actual plot, or, indeed, the meaning of the book is... well, it cannot be explained. It simply must be read. In the end, like Ulysses, this is a book that is more notable for its style, prose, and utter breadth of technique than for its actual content - the old Wildian idea of form over substance. And, though nonsense it may apparently be, oh, what form it is...


Astonishing intensity.   April 28, 1999
17 out of 21 found this review helpful

As soon as you open this book, you are drawn into a beautiful, disturbing, enchanting, harrowing and humerous world. The images are startlingly intense, and due to the sheer number of them, it sometimes takes an enormous amount of time to reach the end of each page. The reader is required to give serious consideration to every sentence in order to fully aprechiate the meaning and feeling behind it. I was frequenly astonished that such a work of art seems to have come so fluently from a human mind, but having previously experienced his utterly beautiful songs, I should expect no less. Cohen here prooves his talents extend to the writing of novels, as well as poetry. I thoroughly recommend this book, and if you do not go into it with an open mind, you will certainly come out of it with one.


Magic is Afoot   May 23, 2000
14 out of 14 found this review helpful

Forget for a moment Cohen the poet, Cohen the prophet, Cohen the musician. The question remains: "Is Cohen a good novelist?"

The answer, suprisingly, is yes. Beautiful Losers can nowhere be described as coherent. It is, at best semi-lucid prose coupled with oblique folk references, a melding of a surrealist love story with a more complex overlay of mythology and cultural humility.

At the bottom level, this is a story about a widower, his bisexual best friend, and a dead wife who slept with both of them.

Somewhere else, this book becomes spiritual. Haunted by exotic visions of the Catherine Tekakwitha, the Iroquois Virgin, the narrator puts context into politics and spiritualism. Tangled up in a scheme of self-discovery is a satire on Canadian politics and recrimination, a story of mourning, and an exploration of the forms of human cruelty.

We get it all.

The book is easy to put down, hard to read into, and still obsessively addictive. You will find yourself running his images through your head long after the cover is closed.