Rating: 
Summary: Cohen's sense of beauty taken to the extreme
Review: "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...
Rating:
Summary: How much there is to being...
Review: An amazing work here. There is much in the way of stark grotesqueness here, images of putressence, grief and shame. There is to be contrasted an ecstatic flip, light upon light, the searching amongst the cess for the soul of the saint. Cohen is a favorite song writer of mine, and I reside in favor of Hallelujah and Famous Blue Rain Coat quite often. But here, in Beautiful Losers, is a crabbing, scrapping, scratching of the fungal sore that results in grace. Grace full. Sexually debauching, with much talk of "pining" and "mining," with long winded image upon image upon image, manipulation of the soul, double-crossing-best-friend-slash-lover-slash-mentor-slash-glorious alter ego, all leaving me with wonderment at how much there is to being....Not to mention the Candian history and Catherine Tekakwitha, the narrator's muse, she being Catholicism's first Indigenous Canadian adherent, or the modern Montreal surrounding the enrapturing apartment where the narrator dwells...Recommending Beautiful Losers, I am....and this: "Let it be our skill to create lengends out of the disposition of the stars, but let it be our glory to forget the legends and watch the night emptily."
Rating: 
Summary: Amazing to find this in print!
Review: I bought this book out of reverence for the man who wrote Bird on a Wire and so much other incredible, passionate music. It is a valiant attempt in the style of Jack Keroauc or Don DiLillo, but without the command of the genre or the ability to conjure and sustain images and moods of a truly accomplished fiction writer. I would suggest you buy a copy of Dharma Bums and listen to Cohen on the stereo while you read...and Leonard, I love you man, but I love you much better when you are singing.
Rating:
Summary: Great
Review: I had to read this for a university course, and I loved it.
It's different in a good way, and like another review said, "uninhibited" is a good word to describe it. Unless you are easily offended by obvious sexuality and that kind of thing, all I can say is, read it.
Rating:
Summary: Great
Review: I had to read this for a university course, and I loved it.
It's different in a good way, and like another review said, "uninhibited" is a good word to describe it. Unless you are easily offended by obvious sexuality and that kind of thing, all I can say is, read it.
Rating:
Summary: I wish I could give six stars.
Review: I have read B.L. twnety-four times since I first bought it in 1999.
I wish that I could say what I feel everytime I read this book.
I wish I could exlain what the book is about.
I wish that the narrator would understand F.
I wish that homosexuality were this simply.
I wish that I didn't have to borrow from someone else, but I do: "I can only repeat with the urgency of fifty years ago: READ HIM" -Ezra Pound (speaking of T.S. Eliot- I'm refering to Cohen, of course. :))
Rating:
Summary: If I were American (& had any money) ....
Review: i WOULD PURCHASE ALL THE LEONARD COHEN BOOKS & SONGS I DON'T ALREADY OWN. I HAVE A COLLECTION IN SYDNEY WITH A FRIEND WHO I HAVEN'T SEEN FOR ABOUT 16 YEARS. SLOWLY I STARTED TO BUILD MY COLLECTION UP ONLY TO REALIZE THE YEARS HAVE SLIPPED AWAY & HE HAS ACCOMLISHED SO MUCH MORE. mY ONLY ONE OF TWO REGRETS IN LIFE IS NOT GOING TO YOUR CONCERT AT THE SYDNEY ENTERTAINMENT CENTRE IN THE MID 1980's. i WAS ONLY 18 & I COULDN'T CONVINCE MY FLATMATES WHO INTRODUCED ME TO YOU (NOT PERSONALLY), OR MAYBE THEY HAD TO WORK AS THEY WERE IN A BAND....aNYWAY I DIDN'T GO. I DIDN'T EVEN GO & LOITER OUTSIDE & TRY & STALK HIM OR ANYTHING. I JUST SAT AT HOME WISHING I WERE SOMEWHERE ELSE.
NOW I LIVE A QUIET LIFE IN SOUTH WEST TASMANIA WHICH EVERYBODY SHOUD VISIT AT LEAST ONCE IN THEIR LIVES. nOW, UNDERSTAND THIS I AM NOT ADVISING ANYONE STOP & IF YOU HAVE TO DON'T STAY FOR TOO LONG. THE FIRST SHOP AS YOU ENTER TOWN THROUGH THE PINE FORESTS IS ALRIGHT TO STOP AT, & THEN TURNING RIGHT JUST BEFORE YOU LEAVE TOWN(WHICH IS 200METRES AWAY) AT THE OTHER SHOP & P.OFF
I THINK I AM ABOUT TO BE LYNCHED BY THE NEIGHBOURS OF WHICH THANKFULLY I DONT HAVE TOO MANY AS I RECENTLY AQUIRED THE SONG "ROAD TO HELL", WHICH REMINDS ME SO MUCH OF HOME....& AS THE CHILDREN TAUGHT ME HOW TO REPEAT SONGS UNTIL SOMEONE TURNS IT OFF ON & ON & ON IT GOES. I WOULD DEARLY LOVE TO MISQUOTE HIM IN MY OWN POETRY. IT'S A FORM OF PLAGURISM IF I DON'T HAVE THE AUTHORS PERMISSSION & IF SOMEHOW YOU COULD GET ME IN CONTACT WITH SOMEONE WHO CAN GIVE ME the authority to go ahead with my poetry I would be extremely grateful.
& this is one of the books I have bought twoce for my collections. Any Leonard Cohen anything I see I buy. Which is not very often.
Anyway I must be sending this off
bye for now
Rating: 
Summary: World of Beauty
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: There are old eggs in the Gobi Desert...
Review: The search for the "true" Kateri Tekakwitha. The "Danish Vibrator". Red nail polish coating a plaster model of the Acropolis. Astounding poignancy and loss. Testimony of the "black robe" Jesuits. Orifices and bodily fluids. Compared to but better than "Naked Lunch". A modern novel that lives up to its hype and has obviously gone on to influence the lives of thousands of other artists over the decades since its arrival. A stream of consciousness work with emphasis on the "consciousness" part. Read it and become initiated!
Rating:
Summary: intense and manic
Review: There is supreme beauty in this book, as well as the extraordinary verbal felicity that is Cohen's trademark. There is also a lot of self-indulgence and overreaching; this book could be used to define "over the top." Poetry and songwriting enforce more discipline on the writer, and that is good for him sometimes. Don't get me wrong, I love Leonard Cohen, but not every random thing he thinks needs the attention he thinks is needs. That said, there is much that is beautiful and moving and insightful here, and I'm glad I read it.
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