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 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 ( )

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 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.

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. ( )

Merging of the sacred and the profane. Love and grief become madness without becoming trite. ( )

James Joyce meets William Bourroughs. ( )