Customer Reviews

Beautiful Losers (INSCRIBED Association copy)

5 star:		(31)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

When this book was first published in the mid-sixties, the NewYork Times reviewer said that he had discovered that James Joycewasn't dead; he was alive and writing in Montreal under the name of Leonard Cohen. Younger fiction fans are likely ignorant of just how influential and omnipresent Leonard Cohen, a young Canadian Jew living in Montreal was in the late 1960s. He was a novelist/poet/songwriter/folksinger, running with the likes of Dylan, Eric Andersen, Paul Simon, Joni Mitchell, Judy Collins, Lou Reed, Van Morrison, etc. etc. etc. His poetry put to music reamins perhaps the most haunting and beautiful to come out of that fabled time. You've surely heard his work, but may not be aware of just how much he influenced his fellows. Here, however, is the ultimate portable testament to the sheer creative powers Cohen wields; 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.

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.

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.

Having avoided Leonard Cohen for so long, lumping him with the "classic rock" I found annoying, I'm now in the midst of a serious Leonard Cohen Obsession by way of a Jeff Buckley cover and then this massively brilliant, inspired and dense, genuis, pornographic, and simply awesome novel. The language in this book is so alive, you would think it would grow flesh on the page. Any passage rivals Henry Miller, James Joyce, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. If you're looking for a plot-driven page turner, go elsewhere. This is the stuff of serious linguistic revelry, for people who like to read books that make you jealous that he wrote it, and you didn't.

Like: Days without work. Why did that list depress me? I should never have made the list. I've done something bad to your belly, Edith. I tried to use it. I tried to use your belly against the Plague. I tried to be a man in a padded locker room telling a beautiful smutty story to eternity. I tried to be an emcee in a tuxedo arousing a lodge of honeymooners, my bed full of golf windows. I forgot that I was desperate. I forgot that I began this research in desperation. My briefcase fooled me. My tidy notes led me astray. I thought I was doing a job.

Or: Oh God, Your Morning Is Perfect. People Are Alive In Your World. I Can Hear The Little Children In The Elevator. The Airplane Is Flying Through The Original Blue. Mouths Are Eating Breakfast. The Radio Is Filled With Electricity. The Trees Are Excellent.

[It goes on for two pages like this, beautiful, perfect.]

So, I would have to say that I give this an effusive six out of five stars.

And, I should add, Leonard Cohen is NOT dead! He is a Zen monk. Where are the novels that he was supposed to write for us? He was cheated out of his retirement fund by an ex-wife/manager. You should buy this book so he can retire comfortably, as he should, one of the great genuises of the English language that has been overshadowed by the filthy stupidity of the rock industry of America.

The end !

"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...

Beautiful Losers is really a poem disguised as a novel. The farther you get into the book, the more stream of consciousness it becomes. Basically, it is about a man who has suffered great loss finding redemption amidst the turmoil of 1960s Quebec. It also is the story about an indigenous woman obtaining sainthood during the turmoil of the age of exploration.

The only criticism I have ever heard when discussing this book with others is that it is vulgar (and only from one person), and he completely dismissed the whole book on this basis. That completely misses the point. It does get vulgar, but the novel is about ordinary people finding enlightenment within the physical world, with all its blood and detritous, and finding hope amongst suffering vs. going up into the mountains and seeking a guru or denying the body as evil like the Cathars. It is about the spirituality that can be found even in the physical world. As a result, if you read it in a bad mood, it may at first reinforce your mood, but it will ultimately pull you out the other end and help you get through.

The book is disturbing at times and requires careful reading, but it is ultimately beautiful.

"Beautiful Losers" merges the profane with the sacred to create an unforgettable, disturbing and wildly elated vision. Using masterful stream-of-consciousness, Leonard Cohen breaks the barriers: nothing is off-limits, nothing is too precious, nothing is too spiritual. Everything, including all forms of erotic acts, will be desecrated on these pages: but none of the writing is gratuitous. With every blasphemous thought and image, we are drawn into an ecstatic spiritual quest, such that in the midst of an insanely orgasmic scene, replete with blood, violence, debilitating pleasure, we find this treasure:

("O Father, Nameless and Free of Description, lead me from the Desert of the Possible. Too long I have dealt with Events. Too long I labored to become an Angel. I chased Miracles with a bag of Power to salt their wild Tails. I tried to dominate Insanity so I could steal its Information. I tried to program the Computers with Insanity. I tried to create Grace to prove that Grace e isted. ... We could not see Evidence stretched our Memories. Dear Father, accept this confession: we did not train ourselves to Receive because we believed there wasn't Anything to Receive and we could not endure with this Belief.")

At the center of the novel is the unforgettable "F", the great iconoclast, the sexualist searching for the divine experience, the man who betrays with joy, who gives and receives pain with bliss, who howls out his darkness in a search for light.

Readers who relate to "Beautiful Losers" may also be open to "Miss MacIntosh My Darling", "Art and Lies", and (of course) Satre's "No Exit." Still, to see such roaring poetry and prose bundled into a novel is rare, and "Beautiful Losers" is one-of-a-kind.

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.

Beautiful Losers is impressive as a work of free association, of stark poetic imagery, of isolation and even, at moments, filth and loathing. Cohen deftly navigates the sublime as both beautiful, delicate and vauntedly tragic and as self-indulgent, filthy, desperate, despondent and ill. I admire his work for this reason, he seems able to strip his descriptions of any political or even polemical quality. And, in spite of this apparent "honesty," I never get the sense the world has lost its beauty or wonder in his eyes. It is disinterest, I suppose, that makes him delve so deeply into his subject. And what isn't his subject?

Catherine Tekawitha is a saint, an Iroquois who forsook her faith and became a Catholic. Her healing powers and capacity for suffering are well within the purview of the Catholic metaphysic. She is a mysterious creature not of the stone chapels and cloistered gradens of Europe but of the North American wilderness, a wilderness surrounding Montreal, city of the protagonist's birth and the place he calls home. This wilderness, both real and perceived, never ceases to suffuse the intellect and libido of the narrator. He chooses St. Kateri as his life's work, discoursing (in French and English) on her history and the many reasons she is both a saint and a legend. Her transcendent power is a source of desire for this young man who has married an Iroquois woman himself and appears to try and make St. Kateri a presence in his own conjugal bed.

But his wife dies. Commits suicide. She was long suffering, misunderstood and even neglected by her lover. Our protagonist remembers her in all of her potency before she took her own life. Is she his wife? Is she the reincarnation of Catherine? Who is she? And what does he want from her? From anyone? He lives in his cloistered apartment that, after his wife's suicide, becomes filled with filth. He seldom removes himself from this degradation and only a male friend/lover can bring him, moment to moment, out of himself.

He is searching for a teacher, longing for someone to show him how to forget himself. It is this search that makes you wonder whether all of this suffering and loss and wastefulness is self-imposed. The narrator is enraptured by St. Kateri's pain threshold, her self-abnegation, the way her scarred body heals itself upon her death. The mysteries of her flesh are many and this apparent detachment of body and spirit (is it detachment really? Cohen makes you wonder) leads her to sainthood, to communion. Does the narrator want the same? He lives in a world where his flesh is not entirely his ally. He has trouble admitting to himself he is bisexual and has a steady liason with his male friend from childhood. This distress, confusion and internal conflict appears to lead him toward this great suffering woman.

But is this a great work? I am not yet convinced. Like Joyce and Miller, Cohen has no trouble bringing forward a variety of stunning images. But is this style over substance? In Joyce I can grasp his intentions and am more easily led toward the development of his aesthetic. Here, I am more resistant. Is there a great story being told within these pages? The jury is still out on this question for me. However, maybe you will decide for yourself? I certainly believe this is worth your effort.

Four stars.

The best way I can describe finishing this story is that you come away feeling you've experienced something and are changed because of it. The story is intense and wild in its extremes, amazingly crude and deeply emotional. It's easy to hate and tricky to love, and has doubtlessly scared away 2/3 of its readers. It's fabulously fantastic at times, and so incredibly mundane and confusing in others... It reads like life.

Don't trust anyone else's opinion; you need to read the story and experience it in your own way, because it's not possible for two people to have the same understanding of it.