Beautiful Losers by Leonard Cohen
My rating: 5/5 cats
worst day ever. thanks for all the everything, l.c.
i have tried to review this book on four separate occasions. for some reason, this is one of the most diffcult books for me to defend to others and to justify to myself.
on the one hand, it’s leonard cohen. enough said.
on the other hand, i can be objective when it comes to him. dear heather is a crap album. there, i said it. i’m sorry, but the world did not need a 9/11 song from him, it is terrible terrible terrible.
on the other hand, it’s leonard cohen.
you see my plight? as a piece of literature, this has a ton of failings, but the bright spots are scouring.
leonard cohen has a way with words that can annihilate me. he has a song i cannot even listen to because it takes everything i hate about myself and puts it to music, and it is an exquisite torture i can only permit myself when i am in the blackest of moods.
there are portions of this novel that i am in awe of:
it has the most devastating passive-aggressive suicide of all time, and its ultimate failure as a gesture is more powerful to me than anything i have ever read. this is not a spoiler, because that is not what the book is about.
so, what is it about? well, it is mishmash catalog of a scholar’s griefs, obsessions, betrayals, recollections, and erotic fascinations. it swerves through time in a way that a more experienced novelist, someone with greater control over the long-form, could perhaps have turned into something more successful, but even with all of its flaws, it remains a favorite of mine.
cohen is not a master storyteller. he is a master wordsmith, and many of his songs operate perfectly well as poetic short stories; chelsea hotel, story of isaac, seems so long ago, nancy, but even though there are passages here that completely stop my heart, overall this book is an experimental novel that overextends itself and never becomes a novel, just a series of episodes that tie together, but doesn’t add anything to the canon of great experimental novels.
so, why is it among my favorites?
he may not have the gas to be a master novelist, but as a sprinter, there is no one better with words. i wanted to include a quotation here, a passage that always stuns me with its power, but i realized today that the “passage” is actually pages 57-61. and there ain’t no way i am going to type all that out. but just know that he out-lolitas lolita in the “making too-young girls sexually attractive” sense. nabokov never convinced me to become a humbert, but cohen makes some good points. more romance novelists should take their cues from his erotic finesse, because he is the only writer who has ever made me appreciate that words can be very sexy, even if i have no personal desire to go after little girls.
and with all cohen’s work, the erotic is so intertwined with the spiritual, it never reads as tawdry. maybe not as classy here as some of his other erotic works, but not as grotesque as other writers with less restraint would come across.
this is a fucking mess of a review. i don’t know why i even tried, except i saw this book from across the room and thought it might be time to actually try to review it. and now that i have written so much, it seems a shame to just scrap it.
whatever.
let’s just call this the ramblings of a lunatic and leave it at that.
