21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
This is the place to begin Cohen's prose work., June 6, 2005
This review is from: The Favorite Game (Paperback)
The Favorite Game is the book I should have picked up before reading Beautiful Losers. It is as if the stylistic experiments Cohen attempted in his second novel make far more sense now. However, having said this I must add that this is the more entertaining and enjoyable work.
This book is about romance. It is always entertaining to hear people talk about love, affection, adoration even fixation as being something only people can have for one another. Lawrence Breavman (the protagonist) feels this way about his life and the many persons and places that populate it. Lisa, Tamara, Shell and the city of Montreal, all are adored by this young man. He loves his best friend Krantz with whom he begins an empassioned dialogue unveiling the many layers of Montreal and Quebecois life oscillating around him in both the city and out in the Laurentian highlands. Breavman truly treats the world as "other." It is beautiful to witness.
There is mysticism in this work. The way Breavman notices the angles of sunlight on his beloved mountain, the colors of the surface of the Saint Lawrence and then the Hudson. The park that he walks through each night and protects. The color of the snow under the moonlight and the sound it gives off when he and a young Lisa are walking home from Hebrew School. Each of these things is as vivid as the young man's search for a partner, for sexual fulfillment. As in Cohen's later work, beauty and grotesqueness and filth coexist and are both the possession of his protagonist's soul. Breavman wanders endlessly through his city (Montreal) taking in every detail he can. His friend Krantz acknowledges -one summer night- that they would walk endlessly and never sleep if they were to follow Breavman's whims, his aesthetic eye, the contours of his persistent and ever unfolding dialogue.
This is a beautiful story. Like James Joyce, Cohen has taken up the development of the young artist's personal aesthetic sense (and appetite). Joyce made the distinction between "fetishism" and admiration for beauty in The Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man. Stephen Daedalus didn't want to possess beauty, he wanted to really learn how to admire it, appreciate it, recreate it if he could. Lawrence Breavman wants to appreciate beauty as well and he moves beyond merely desiring to possess what he sees. He may pause and admire the infinite little details of being in the world, but he learns to never possess but to engage. His dialogue is an engagement with beauty that, interestingly, supersedes his literary career. The young man, like Stephen Daedalus, is an emerging artist. But his dialogue is what Cohen cares about and his peregrinations, his questions and escapades are all the real art. Stephen Daedalus learned that he could recreate the world in his imagination and then place this on paper and by doing so, would have done his aesthetic duty, would have engaged the world. In Cohen's account, we see the artist as wanderer, as more than reticent observer. But he is no fetishist, he does not need to drown in sensual pleasures. Life is sensual for him. Life is enduring and eternal and he needs no false Gods to redeem him from a fallen state or from desolation.
Five stars. At times this work is breathtaking.
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23 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Cohen-as-Salinger, February 22, 2000
The Favourite Game is wistful and sentimental (in a good way), well-written, fun to read, and especially evocative in recreating the early 1960's in urban North American and Montreal in particular. It's a coming-of-age novel in the Salinger vein, following a Young Bright Man (too young for the Beats) and his midadventures. This is only Cohen work that could be optioned for the movies (and succeed as a movie, too). Not as heartbreaking as Cohen's other work, more straightforward than Beautiful Losers, The Favourite Game is arty entertainment that's worth taking on the train or to the beach. (And cheap, too!)
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25 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Sweetly and self-consciously veiled autobiography, July 31, 2000
This novel is charming, and is a must-read for any Cohen fan, whether fanatical or merely curious. It reads like well-wrought and sophisticated free-verse poem, but is highly novelistic in its content. What is presumed to be misogyny by Cohen's critics is made to feel, if not natural, then reasonable, and understandable. Readers are invited in to his self-explication and self-exploration; he carries us through a maquette of his youth and his young-adulthood. (Remember, he wrote this when he was in his late twenties.) He may be criticized for romanticizing his past, but any such faltering from the truth is attributable to his writing style, and that he changed some details for novelistic reasons (it is not intended to be an actual autobiography). Those who are familiar with Cohen's lifetime and writings will recognize his "larger than life" persona in this novel, as the protagonist Lawrence Breavman, as a near-replica of Cohen's self, a self that is the self that Cohen enjoys painting for his readership via his writing and interviews. This novel presents an interesting view of a famous person's understanding of who he is, and of his personal philosophies.
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