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Loading... Beautiful Losers (1966)by Leonard COHEN
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. This book makes me so wistful. Pre-internet, pre-irony, just sucking a dude off in a rowboat. I couldn't stop reading! Wanders from the material to the mystical without ever losing its sense of humor, and despite all its excesses never loses its humanity. I felt the same way when I read "Les Enfants Terribles" when I was younger, like, here was this sexy book about kissing cousins, so decadent, so apolitical and unnecessary, so why did I like it so much? (Besides the obvious.) Because books like these play out like vivid fever dreams, written in ecstatic prose that recreates a kind of religious experience. There's so few things that can evoke that raw feeling, again with the DFW quotes, something something about sex, religion, fiction and music being the few places where loneliness can be transfigured & treated. So much psychedelic and experimental lit I just wanna throw in the junkbin but this book is like a sad-eyed thrift store Jesus, totally mesmerizing. Leonard Cohen can embody any moment and make it radiate outwards/inwards. This is the kind of book I wish I could write. 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 stature.....please advise.... 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 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.
"...a lyrical dream of Montreal, combined with Canadian religious history and the nature of sainthood."
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." No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
Is this you?Become a LibraryThing Author. Penguin AustraliaAn edition of this book was published by Penguin Australia. |
"Fashion this prayer to Thee. I don't know to get it with 1000-voice choir effect like 'consider the lily.' Fashion this heap with gleaming snow-shovel facets, for I meant to build an altar. I meant to light a curious little highway shrine, but I drown in the ancient snake cistern. I meant to harness plastic butterflies with rubber-band motors and whisper: 'Consider the plastic butterfly': but I shiver under the shadow of the diving archaeopteryx."
And that was just a page I opened to at random. ( )