Status
Available
Call number
Genres
Publication
Stockholm : PAN/Norstedt, 1971 ;
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 character's attainment of a state of self-abandonment, in which the sensualist cannot be distinguished from the saint. "From the Trade Paperback edition."
Media reviews
World Book Encyclopedia
"...a lyrical dream of Montreal, combined with Canadian religious history and the nature of sainthood."
User reviews
LibraryThing member NativeRoses
Merging of the sacred and the profane. Love and grief become madness without becoming trite.
LibraryThing member Cait86
Well, here is a Canadian novel to not add to the TBR pile. Beautiful Losers is easily the worst book I have read all year - and actually, it may be the worst book I have ever read. The only reason I finished it (ok, so I skimmed a lot) is because I had already devoted many hours to it, and didn't
Beautiful Losers is one of the most experimental novels of the 1960s, and I feel as though it contains everything that is stereotypically 60s - namely, overt drug use and ample explicit sex. Cohen (yes, the musician) uses a stream-of-consciousness style much like James Joyce or Jack Kerouac, but with considerably less skill. Entire pages of this novel are lists of random words, the narrative is extremely fractured, and the language absurd.
The plot, what little there is, recounts the lives of the unnamed narrator, his wife Edith, and their friend F. The three of them live in a sexual love-triangle from hell.
Now, maybe this is just not my thing. Certainly reviews of this book on Amazon are favourable, and so I am willing to admit that Cohen's novel does resound with other readers.
OK, to be honest, I have no idea who would enjoy Beautiful Losers. It was just that awful.
0.5 stars - because 0 is not an option
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want to waste them. So, even though I am sure I injested very little of this drivel, I am counting it anyway!Beautiful Losers is one of the most experimental novels of the 1960s, and I feel as though it contains everything that is stereotypically 60s - namely, overt drug use and ample explicit sex. Cohen (yes, the musician) uses a stream-of-consciousness style much like James Joyce or Jack Kerouac, but with considerably less skill. Entire pages of this novel are lists of random words, the narrative is extremely fractured, and the language absurd.
The plot, what little there is, recounts the lives of the unnamed narrator, his wife Edith, and their friend F. The three of them live in a sexual love-triangle from hell.
Now, maybe this is just not my thing. Certainly reviews of this book on Amazon are favourable, and so I am willing to admit that Cohen's novel does resound with other readers.
OK, to be honest, I have no idea who would enjoy Beautiful Losers. It was just that awful.
0.5 stars - because 0 is not an option
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LibraryThing member mudslideslim
In the early sixties, the authors' life, which until then had been an intoxicating carosel of music,booze, and sex escapades, was turned inside out. His beautiful wife, his muse, his fellow traveler through that life, took her own life. His best friend and longtime philosofical mentor,dying of some
The rest of us would choose the obvious, a bullet, a truckload of booze or simply put on a dress, pickup a machine gun and head on down to the post office to make things right. But not our dear Mr. Cohen, instead he wrote.
At first, I was a little confused,maybe even a little frightened, I wished I was stoned so could make some sense of it. It was a metaphorical rodeo of words and I was riding a panicked blind horse at full speed through it. Then he took a breath and I breathed with him and I glimsped his aim. He was vomiting his pain and it was spewing out in seemingly nonsensical order but was forming the most heartbreaking blues tune ever written. In rare moments, he would come to himself and start a fantasy about some character from 200 years in the past, then just as suddenly the next verse would start and you just had to hang on.Memories of better times would surface and for a short time, you could catch your literary breath and then it would be time for the bridge and the final verse.
Songs like this never really end, you simply grow tired of singing them. I love his music,but not this song,this one, I already knew the words.
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hideous disease, decides to pick this time to confess to his long time affair with said wife, dying shortly after. Momentary recap: wife, best friend,dead. Not before destroying every last cell of human sentiment left in the man. There is no word in the English dictionary for that feeling. The author, when asked where he was coming from in this novel, replied: "sunstroke"The rest of us would choose the obvious, a bullet, a truckload of booze or simply put on a dress, pickup a machine gun and head on down to the post office to make things right. But not our dear Mr. Cohen, instead he wrote.
At first, I was a little confused,maybe even a little frightened, I wished I was stoned so could make some sense of it. It was a metaphorical rodeo of words and I was riding a panicked blind horse at full speed through it. Then he took a breath and I breathed with him and I glimsped his aim. He was vomiting his pain and it was spewing out in seemingly nonsensical order but was forming the most heartbreaking blues tune ever written. In rare moments, he would come to himself and start a fantasy about some character from 200 years in the past, then just as suddenly the next verse would start and you just had to hang on.Memories of better times would surface and for a short time, you could catch your literary breath and then it would be time for the bridge and the final verse.
Songs like this never really end, you simply grow tired of singing them. I love his music,but not this song,this one, I already knew the words.
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LibraryThing member kirstiecat
Leonard Cohen walks a precarious tightrope balancing the sacred and the profane and, because he is *the* Leonard Cohen, doesn't fall from his great height. At the same time, it is very disjointed and a little unclear. It's an exploration of sexuality but way more than that. Though Beautiful Losers
"Jealousy is the education you have chosen"
"Ordinary eternal machinery like the grinding of the stars."
(p.33)
"You don't polish windows in a car wreck:
(p.40)
"I'm tired of facts. I'm tired of speculations. I want to be consumed by unreason."
(p.46)
"The hospitals have drawers of Cancer which they do not own."
"Nausea is an earthquake in your eye"
"Even the world has a body."
"We are all of us tormented with your glory."
(p.54)
"Steam coming off the planet, clouds of fleecy steam as boy and girl populations clash in religious riots, hot and whistling like a graveyard sodomist our little planet embraces its fragile yo-yo destiny, tuned in the secular mind like a dying engine."
(p. 150)
"In Montréal, spring is like an autopsy. Everyone wants to see the inside of the frozen mammoth"
(p.229)
"Above him on the electric wires perched the first crows of the year, arranged between the poles like abacus beads."
(p. 234)
"Quickly now, as if even he participated in the excitement over the unknown, he greedily assembled himself into-into a movie of Ray Charles. Then he enlarged the screen, degree by degree like a documentary on the Industry. The moon occupied one lens of his sunglasses, and he laid out his piano keys across a shelf of the sky, and leaned over him as though they were truly the row of giant fishes to feed a hungry multitude. A fleet of jet planes dragged his voice over us who were holding hands."
(p.242)
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is perhaps Cohen's most well known and highly appraised novel, I liked "The Favorite Game" better. Some memorable quotes from this one:"Jealousy is the education you have chosen"
"Ordinary eternal machinery like the grinding of the stars."
(p.33)
"You don't polish windows in a car wreck:
(p.40)
"I'm tired of facts. I'm tired of speculations. I want to be consumed by unreason."
(p.46)
"The hospitals have drawers of Cancer which they do not own."
"Nausea is an earthquake in your eye"
"Even the world has a body."
"We are all of us tormented with your glory."
(p.54)
"Steam coming off the planet, clouds of fleecy steam as boy and girl populations clash in religious riots, hot and whistling like a graveyard sodomist our little planet embraces its fragile yo-yo destiny, tuned in the secular mind like a dying engine."
(p. 150)
"In Montréal, spring is like an autopsy. Everyone wants to see the inside of the frozen mammoth"
(p.229)
"Above him on the electric wires perched the first crows of the year, arranged between the poles like abacus beads."
(p. 234)
"Quickly now, as if even he participated in the excitement over the unknown, he greedily assembled himself into-into a movie of Ray Charles. Then he enlarged the screen, degree by degree like a documentary on the Industry. The moon occupied one lens of his sunglasses, and he laid out his piano keys across a shelf of the sky, and leaned over him as though they were truly the row of giant fishes to feed a hungry multitude. A fleet of jet planes dragged his voice over us who were holding hands."
(p.242)
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LibraryThing member blanderson
A novel of beautiful passages and long, quasi-interesting metaphysical mumbo-jumbo befitting an experimental novel from the late-60s. A lot of Cohen's most famous scenes of love, betrayal, cuckoldry, desperation and sexuality appear here in various degrees of perfection.
All the passages about
It is Cohen's insistence of making the novel Metafictional, and historical, that really chunks the narrative down to a dulled pace. A lot of his points about history, story, and memory are made more powerfully thru the interactions of the novel's main characters than thru the narrator's often longwinded ramblings about Katherine and Canada.
Stylistically, Cohen is a genius, and his composition is virtually flawless on a sentence-by-sentence basis. However, sometimes beautiful prose and beautiful ideas are not enough to propel a novel's narrative and emotional weight.
A flawed, but beautiful novel, that always managed to make me bored after 20 pages, mostly because the scenes of emotional weight are pancaked between long portions of what seems to me like the sort of Academic pandering that has plagued Canadian writing for a while (OH, History is subjective! woop woop! Canadian Identity, woop!)
I struggled for years to enjoy this novel and eventually gave up around the half-way mark. This is upsetting since I am a HUGE Leonard Cohen mark and have always wanted to like his experimental writing. Unfortunately the novel is less enjoyable than the sum of its parts.
All the passages about
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emotion, love and sex---about ownership in the age of free love---are beautiful and arresting. The narrator's love-triangle relationship with F., his swashbuckling companion, and Edith (his deceased wife) is truly powerful stuff. It is Cohen's insistence of making the novel Metafictional, and historical, that really chunks the narrative down to a dulled pace. A lot of his points about history, story, and memory are made more powerfully thru the interactions of the novel's main characters than thru the narrator's often longwinded ramblings about Katherine and Canada.
Stylistically, Cohen is a genius, and his composition is virtually flawless on a sentence-by-sentence basis. However, sometimes beautiful prose and beautiful ideas are not enough to propel a novel's narrative and emotional weight.
A flawed, but beautiful novel, that always managed to make me bored after 20 pages, mostly because the scenes of emotional weight are pancaked between long portions of what seems to me like the sort of Academic pandering that has plagued Canadian writing for a while (OH, History is subjective! woop woop! Canadian Identity, woop!)
I struggled for years to enjoy this novel and eventually gave up around the half-way mark. This is upsetting since I am a HUGE Leonard Cohen mark and have always wanted to like his experimental writing. Unfortunately the novel is less enjoyable than the sum of its parts.
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LibraryThing member Bridgey
Beautiful losers - Leonard Cohen ***
Leonard Cohen is a man of many talents. I consider him the greatest songwriter (second only to Dylan) in the world, an amazing and thought provoking poet and accomplished artist. The man oozes charisma and intelligence from every pore and attending his live
I first discovered Beautiful losers around 10 years ago and after sitting there for over a hour and found that I couldn't even get through the first 30 pages. It was then duly placed to one side and forgotten about. I have always wished that I had persevered as I was sure that I was missing something. With this in mind I picked it up again and settled down for a read.
The novel is split into 3 parts, the first part is told through the eyes of an anonymous narrator and details his bizarre relationship with his wife (Edith) and best friend ('F'), interwoven into this is the story of Catherine Tekakwitha a 17th Century Saint. As the narrator recounts past events (whether real or imagined we are never totally sure) it becomes apparent that out of the group he is the only one left alive. All sounds a little bizarre? That's because it is. Although the previous sentence may indicate that there is some sort of plot to the novel you would be extremely hard pressed to find one. What about themes I hear you ask? Well for me the only really apparent theme was that of sex. Graphic descriptions on practically every page (I am sure that this book must hold some sort of record for using the c*** word) that would give even Richard Laymon a run for his money. I am no prude and this sort of thing really doesn't bother me in the slightest, but it just gets very tiresome after the first 100 or so times. I understand that this was written in 1966 during the 'sexual revolution' and maybe this had some sort of influence on Cohen, although he has admitted himself that it was produced under the influence of 'fasting and amphetamines'.
The second part of the book follows much the same as the first, only this is written in the form of a letter to the narrator. The 3rd part is much briefer and I really hoped for some kind of epiphany moment whereby I would put my finger in the air and declare 'So this is what it was all about!', it never happened.
However, despite all the various illogical ramblings there are some moments of brilliance to be found within the pages. We all know the wit and insight that Cohen is capable of and it is well worth wading through the endless nonsense. Such highlights as:
"What is most original in a man's nature is often that which is most desperate. Thus new systems are forced on the world by men who simply cannot bear the pain of living with what is."
Are accompanied by such drivel as:
"Edith Edith Edith long things forever Edith Edie cuntie Edith where your little Edith Edith Edith Edith Edith stretchy on E E E octopus complexion purse Edith lips lips area thy panties Edit Edith Edith Edith knew you your wet rivulets Eeeeddddiiiittthhhh yug yug sniffle truffle deep bulb bud button sweet soup pea spit rub hood rubber knob girl come head bup bup one bloom pug pig yum one tip tongue lug from end of bed of lips multiple lost sunk gone rise girl head small come knob splash sunk lostlick search nose help wobble hard once more lurk up girl knob bob bubble sunk in normal skin folds lab drowned lady labia up up appear pea bean..."
I keep wanting to love the book and really tried to love it. It appears on Amazon that a number of people do, but an almost equal number don't. Maybe I will revisit it one day in the future again and once more hope for the 'epiphany' moment. But I wonder if this was uncredited work how many of those raving reviews would remain.
Leonard Cohen is a man of many talents. I consider him the greatest songwriter (second only to Dylan) in the world, an amazing and thought provoking poet and accomplished artist. The man oozes charisma and intelligence from every pore and attending his live
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concerts has ranked amongst some of the best moments of my life. However, Cohen is less known as a novelist and has published two novels (My Favourite Game & Beautiful Losers) very early on in his career.I first discovered Beautiful losers around 10 years ago and after sitting there for over a hour and found that I couldn't even get through the first 30 pages. It was then duly placed to one side and forgotten about. I have always wished that I had persevered as I was sure that I was missing something. With this in mind I picked it up again and settled down for a read.
The novel is split into 3 parts, the first part is told through the eyes of an anonymous narrator and details his bizarre relationship with his wife (Edith) and best friend ('F'), interwoven into this is the story of Catherine Tekakwitha a 17th Century Saint. As the narrator recounts past events (whether real or imagined we are never totally sure) it becomes apparent that out of the group he is the only one left alive. All sounds a little bizarre? That's because it is. Although the previous sentence may indicate that there is some sort of plot to the novel you would be extremely hard pressed to find one. What about themes I hear you ask? Well for me the only really apparent theme was that of sex. Graphic descriptions on practically every page (I am sure that this book must hold some sort of record for using the c*** word) that would give even Richard Laymon a run for his money. I am no prude and this sort of thing really doesn't bother me in the slightest, but it just gets very tiresome after the first 100 or so times. I understand that this was written in 1966 during the 'sexual revolution' and maybe this had some sort of influence on Cohen, although he has admitted himself that it was produced under the influence of 'fasting and amphetamines'.
The second part of the book follows much the same as the first, only this is written in the form of a letter to the narrator. The 3rd part is much briefer and I really hoped for some kind of epiphany moment whereby I would put my finger in the air and declare 'So this is what it was all about!', it never happened.
However, despite all the various illogical ramblings there are some moments of brilliance to be found within the pages. We all know the wit and insight that Cohen is capable of and it is well worth wading through the endless nonsense. Such highlights as:
"What is most original in a man's nature is often that which is most desperate. Thus new systems are forced on the world by men who simply cannot bear the pain of living with what is."
Are accompanied by such drivel as:
"Edith Edith Edith long things forever Edith Edie cuntie Edith where your little Edith Edith Edith Edith Edith stretchy on E E E octopus complexion purse Edith lips lips area thy panties Edit Edith Edith Edith knew you your wet rivulets Eeeeddddiiiittthhhh yug yug sniffle truffle deep bulb bud button sweet soup pea spit rub hood rubber knob girl come head bup bup one bloom pug pig yum one tip tongue lug from end of bed of lips multiple lost sunk gone rise girl head small come knob splash sunk lostlick search nose help wobble hard once more lurk up girl knob bob bubble sunk in normal skin folds lab drowned lady labia up up appear pea bean..."
I keep wanting to love the book and really tried to love it. It appears on Amazon that a number of people do, but an almost equal number don't. Maybe I will revisit it one day in the future again and once more hope for the 'epiphany' moment. But I wonder if this was uncredited work how many of those raving reviews would remain.
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LibraryThing member yogipoet
always been a cohenite, read this one long ago. it's a jumble of fragments, or was that the other novel? cohenites will read, others will pass him by perhaps.
LibraryThing member palaverofbirds
A tad more experimental, dare-I-say "jazzy" than his other prose (not that it has anything to do with jazz music.) Leonard Cohen always writes as Leonard Cohen - every word is a bit of himself - and in this book he's a little more free with his descriptions and metaphors, almost more poetic with
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pacing of words and sentences, and as always, tres sexy. Show Less
LibraryThing member charlie68
Well what to say about this book. One of the dirtiest books I've read in a long time. Some pearls of writing to be found, but to have wade through all the crap and other human fluids. M. Cohen should perhaps stick to song writing.
LibraryThing member gypsysmom
I may never be able to enjoy Leonard Cohen's music again after reading this book. I would like to think that, since it was written in 1966, he has matured since then. However, I just read a review of his latest book of poetry and it seems from some of the excerpts that he is just as enthralled with
The basic story line of this book involves a love triangle formed of the nameless narrator, his wife, Edith, and his best boyhood friend, F. After Edith kills herself and F. dies of some sexually transmitted disease, the narrator is left to try to decipher F.'s last instructions. There is way too much discussion of the narrator's bodily functions. The narrator is an historian who is researching the Iroquois Virgin, Catherine Tekakwitha. There is also way too much description of how the native people reacted to the imposition of Christianity. Some killed the Jesuits who brought the word while some, like Catherine, converted and began to flagellate, starve and otherwise torture themselves.
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his private parts as is exhibited in this book.The basic story line of this book involves a love triangle formed of the nameless narrator, his wife, Edith, and his best boyhood friend, F. After Edith kills herself and F. dies of some sexually transmitted disease, the narrator is left to try to decipher F.'s last instructions. There is way too much discussion of the narrator's bodily functions. The narrator is an historian who is researching the Iroquois Virgin, Catherine Tekakwitha. There is also way too much description of how the native people reacted to the imposition of Christianity. Some killed the Jesuits who brought the word while some, like Catherine, converted and began to flagellate, starve and otherwise torture themselves.
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LibraryThing member macflaherty
James Joyce meets William Bourroughs.
LibraryThing member DinadansFriend
the great Canadian Dirty Book! It was also a quite well crafted exploration of the heady delights of the first fully explored love affair. While i am told, it is very male oriented, it is still a good example of what "he" was thinking....perhaps there hasn't been a female novel of the same
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stature.....please advise.... Show Less
LibraryThing member csaavedra
I always knew that there had to be more to Cohen than a poetic ladies' man. This side of Cohen is only for those who want to know his darkest thoughts and have the guts to discover a man who's not afraid of boundaries. A brilliant novel, where even the most horrible things a human can go through
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(abuse, solitude, the journey to insanity, and death) are presented in a beautiful way. Show Less
LibraryThing member the.ken.petersen
I love Leonard Cohen's music, I adore his poetry BUT, this novel did nothing for me. It is too concerned with being clever and not sufficiently with creating character and story.
I need to play some of Cohen's music and read some of his poetry now to set the man back on his rightful plinth.
I need to play some of Cohen's music and read some of his poetry now to set the man back on his rightful plinth.
Subjects
Awards
Canada Reads (Nominee — 2005)
Language
Original language
English
Original publication date
1966