Beautiful Losers

One of the best-known experimental novels of the 1960s, Beautiful Losers is Leonard Cohen’ s most defiant and uninhibited work. As imagined by Cohen, hell is an apartment in Montreal, where a bereaved and lust-tormented narrator reconstructs his relations with the dead. In that hell two men and a woman twine impossibly and betray one another again and again. Memory blurs into blasphemous sexual fantasy--and redemption takes the form of an Iroquois saint and virgin who has been dead for 300 years but still has the power to save even the most degraded of her suitors. First published in 1966, Beautiful Losers demonstrates that its author is not only a superb songwriter but also a novelist of visionary power. Funny, harrowing, and show more fiercely moving, it is a classic erotic tragedy, incandescent in its prose and exhilarating for its risky union of sexuality and faith. show less

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 show more 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. show less

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 show more 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. show less

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....

A strange and difficult book, I confess that oftentimes I didn't really know what I was reading about in Beautiful Losers. Perhaps this is my fault, but it is certainly not a book that is easy to truly engage with. It veers wildly in style and substance; it varies from steady prose to experimental ramblings, from intensely eloquent poetry to crude imagery and vulgar language. Obtuse and borderline impenetrable, it occasionally introduces passages in untranslated French and Greek. Consequently, it is hard to really get a grasp on it. Cohen himself, in a 'Note to the Reader' at the end of my 2009 Blue Door edition, describes it, in his endearingly modest, self-deprecating way, as 'the frenzied thoughts of my youth' and 'more of a show more sunstroke than a book'. These are apt descriptions, and there is no sure way of determining whether prospective readers will enjoy it (though surely devoted Cohenites like myself will have patience with it). For my part, I enjoyed having Cohen's prose swimming around in my head, even though the larger picture failed to manifest itself. show less

My rating of this book is probably proof that I'll forgive a novel just about anything if it sounds enough like a poem. This book was absolutely weird (it's also absolutely filthy and would be a great choice for anyone who wants to punk their book club). Was it good literature? Someone better than me will have to figure that out, because I couldn't tell. Who cares, it has passages like this:

"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 show more 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. show less

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 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 show more 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. show less