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Feb 24, 2011

Lorenzo rated it:

I used to have a problem with Leonard Cohen.
He gave me headache.
This has to be explained.

When I was 5 years old my mum was a teacher in a small nursery school somewhere on the mountains. Having not the money for hiring a babysitter and being myself more or less the same age of her schoolkids I was joining her on Saturdays, when my school was closed.

At that time -1987- most of the Italian radio stations were hard to catch on the mountains we were heading to. More...

2 comments like (4 people liked it)

Dec 01, 2007

Paul rated it:

Okay, this book is mental, and proves Laughing Leonard not just to be the Grocer of Despair as his detractors may have unkindly phrased it, but capable of impressive rudeness and high humour. And then you get exquisite prose poems like the following, which the great Buffy Sainte-Marie extracted and made an incredible song out of. I would say that as one who profoundly believes that if there is a God he clearly has long since got bored with the human race if he ever noticed he'd created us in the More...

4 comments like (6 people liked it)

Nov 26, 2007

Empress rated it:

Oh Leonard, how I love you, but do not so-much love this book. Again, I am letting myself be lazy and file it away to finish in another era, but from what I have read so far, I need to be in more of a sitting-on-a-dirty-rooftop-in-the-rain-drinking-whiskey-and-smoking-cigarettes -sort-of-mood before I can fully appreciate what you've got to offer here.
I love the poems Man, and I love the lyrics, (and I especially love the club, E & C) and though pieces of it are absolutely stunning, I a More...

1 comment like (4 people liked it)

Mar 06, 2011

Catherine rated it:

As a long-time fan of Cohen's poetry and music, when I stumbled upon 'Beautiful Losers' I picked it up immediately. I didn't know what to think at first; I think the eccentric and overly articulate style of writing kind of stunned me. I'd never read anything quite so different before. It seemed different from his lyrics somehow; more ornamental and steeped in spirituality. I read the book in high school, and the writing was inevitably too thorough for me to really comprehend.

So look More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Dec 03, 2009

Mark added it

It's finally over. I'll admit something about this story of a unnamed narrator, his suicided wife, their mutual friend and lover F. and the long dead but revered in the nameless narrator's memory Kateri Tekakwitha (an actual historical figure) kept me hooked and, at times, moved. But I'll also admit that for every passage in the book that lifted me up with carefully crafted (and often chuckle out loud sarcastically funny) prose, there were elsewhere three or four times that it disappointed by dr More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

May 07, 2009

Curtis rated it:

Decadently filthy, obtuse and unrelenting, Beautiful Losers is characteristically unlike the Leonard Cohen of the early 1960s. Rather than the rhythmic, dulcet poetry and lyrics, the novel is of dense prose that more resembles the beat poetry of Kesey or Ginsberg, encapsulating the loose spirit and free living of the era in which it was written, having been first published in 1966.

Beautiful Losers captures two distinct historical periods and myriad tensions that threaten to tear them More...

0 comments like (5 people liked it)

Oct 10, 2009

Eddie rated it:

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!

Cunts are a forest of pricks where saints and seekers exchange dirty luminescent fluids in microscopes of madhouses stitched together, and shattered, and stitched together again by tidal sways in the eternal machinery of the ever-loving Mothers.

Inspired farrago? Result of not wearing a hat in the hot Mediterranean sun? Masturbation fantasy of beatitude? Hippy dipshit revolutionary nonsense failing to revolutionize? Jews for Jesus dream of Heaven?
More...

9 comments like (5 people liked it)

Mar 23, 2011

Jay rated it:

Leonard Cohen, so often unfairly referred to as the Dylan of the Great North, has a special talent in which he infuses every moment of life with poetry and magic. This novel, a story of a love affiar between a mad, mystic nationalist, a dead Iroquois saint, recently deceased wife and a broken, lonely man, is beautifully (if not grotesquely) told. The tapestry is weaved of sex and regret, hallucinatory buddhist ramblings and the dejected voice of the one left behind. A crushing novel of sadness a More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jan 09, 2010

Simon rated it:

Impossible to describe or summarise, this is a novel of extraordinary power. Obscene, pornographic, incoherent, sick, Beautiful Losers is all of these, but it is also heartbreakingly beautiful, sad, haunted and elegiac. Much of 60s counter-culture is being rediscovered now, but this does more than any Jack Kerouac or Marshall McLuhan can do, and is more involving, weirder and ultimately more serious. It is about loneliness, freezing weather and a man at the edge of his reason, endlessly mourning More...

2 comments like (3 people liked it)

Aug 16, 2007

sarah rated it:

I'm shy, so I won't go into the details of this book. Lots of beautiful/funny/grotesque imagery coming from an exhausting amount of pornographic material. The funny moments really are funny, and sometimes sarcastic. I appreciate this book not for the sum of its parts, but for its parts? yeah.

2 comments like (2 people liked it)

May 28, 2009

Claire rated it:

I "borrowed" an old edition from a bookshelf in the hall of my college's English department. Graduated. Still hadn't finished reading it.

This spring, I finished it on the subway and immediately turned back to the beginning. The second time around, I wrote down all the page numbers of all my favorite excerpts as I went along. I must copy them out at some point.

Before writing this review, I read some others, and sarah said pretty much what I was thinking: "

More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Feb 16, 2008

Sheera rated it:

I read this in 8th grade for some reason. This book is one part Sartre's "No Exit" and three parts gin purchased at a gas station.

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jan 13, 2009

Lara rated it:

Leonard Cohen often makes me cry. I sat on the floor of a bookstore with my hair streaming rain and collecting the smells of coffee and ink and read his book of poetry, Stranger Music, almost cover to cover, mostly in tears. I heard his words in my head long before I remembered he sometimes sang them; I like his voice, and forget to like his music.

This book was strange - at first I wanted to hate it, to be bored by the leaping into the past and the Algonquins and the endless fuckin More...

1 comment like (3 people liked it)

Sep 12, 2008

Rebecca rated it:

Jumbled ecstasy. Saint shagging cited as solution to sacred V profane.

*dusts off silver platter* ;)

1 comment like (1 person liked it)

Nov 09, 2011

Vickguns rated it:

I love Leonard Cohen. This book did not let me down in my opinion of him as being one of the worlds greatest word-smiths. Reading this book I couldn't help but think it was just one great stream of consciousness spill. The language is rhythmical, beautiful and strange and the images created in my head were fuzzy, morphine be-dazzled afflictions.. sometimes bordering on obscene dreamscapes. The writing breaks a lot of taboos which sometimes made me cringe and want to step out of the world, but th More...

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Jan 14, 2009

Inuitdebonair rated it:

Best book ever in short

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Sep 10, 2011

Patrick rated it:

Everything is sacred. Nothing is profane. It is a new age concept born out in the sixties and stained with all of that decade's excesses including sex and drugs. Beautiful Losers was published in 1966.

The book jacket tells me this book is about a love triangle lived out in a hell that is an apartment in Montreal. I am not sure that is true. If this is hell, it is not Dante's hell. It is not Sartre's hell. It is a disjointed, incomplete and unfinished hell.

The Catholic Saint More...

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Mar 04, 2011

Giovanni rated it:

There are times when you rate a book one star because they make no sense in how they handle their themes, or a cohesive story, in a responsible, interesting way.

There are times when you rate a book one star because it didn't click with you, but you can respect other people for liking it.

There are times -- okay I have to stop here, because I'll just quote my philosophy teacher instead. "Cohen's laughing at you when you read, this, man! He probably churned it off durin More...

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Mar 14, 2011

Chris rated it:

Alright Cohen, you had me laughing a few times in the first fifty pages of this, but after that I had to slog harder than when I was meant to laugh at the squalid lives described in "A Confederacy of Dunces." I get it. Your characters don't know whether to fuck or cry. They don't know if they should spend their lives in self gratification or flaggelation or possibly expend a lot of hot air convincing themselves that they are one and the same. Your book should be called "Stark Op More...

1 comment like

Sep 04, 2008

Kirstie rated it:

Leonard Cohen walks a precarious tightrope balancing the sacred and the profane and, because he is *the* Leonard Cohen, doesn't fall from his great height. At the same time, it is very disjointed and a little unclear. It's an exploration of sexuality but way more than that. Though Beautiful Losers is perhaps Cohen's most well known and highly appraised novel, I liked "The Favorite Game" better. Some memorable quotes from this one:

"Jealousy is the education you More...

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Jul 02, 2008

matt rated it:

I read this in college, at about the same time as I first gave "Songs Of Love and Hate" a spin.

!?!

It's sort of strange to think of it now, having these two bizarre (not a word I take lightly) and manaical texts as my introduction to Sad-Eyed-Lenny of the Lowlands.

I'm now a huge fan and I can't shake the magic spell of his music no matter how hard I try to (I don't try very hard). His music puts me in a trance-state, he's a first run songwrit More...

0 comments like

Apr 19, 2008

Debs rated it:

I don't know what the hell to say about this book. So I'll talk about the feelings. Sometimes, I had to shut it because it was too nauseating. Sometimes I thought it was delicious, and disgusting. Sometimes my thoughts ran in parallel with it. At one point I declared that it was the best book in all the world because it just felt...so good.

I'll try to break it down. This was by far the strangest and most uninhibited thing that I have ever read. I felt as though I had never read a bo More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

May 07, 2008

Ryan rated it:

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here

2 comments like

Oct 01, 2007

Dottie rated it:

Not finished yet but from the large portion of this which I read during the cross-country trip, I would say it isn't for many -- maybe even most -- readers. It's a bit "blue" for my tastes which is to be expected I suppose but the underlying story of dealing with the grief after losing a loved one is interesting. Time will tell where I come down on this one. I think anyone curious about Cohen (that's how I got here) or who likes Cohen's work and music would be fine with this while o More...

0 comments like

Jan 03, 2012

Alexandra rated it:

Cohen contrives to depress the fuck out of the reader, and, in my case, invariably succeeds. He has a tendency to dwell on the sexual with unwavering tenacity, filling his novels with grotesque imagery to no great purpose. Maybe I just don't get Cohen; in the end, I find I haven't gained any sort of insight into his supposed genius, nor have I seen the "point" of his having taking up a pen in the first place. It all boils down to a purile narrative with a thoroughly unsympathetic narra

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Feb 01, 2009

Andrew added it

I was expecting something similar to Mr. Cohen's songwriting, but I couldn't imagine two more different types of language. As opposed to his dark, laconic folk songs, this is a freewheeling, wordplay-laden, novel that I could best compare to Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49. The difference between Cohen and other so-called (incorrectly, I feel) postmodernists, is the overwhelmingly messianic quality of both his plot predilections and his style. This might be what the second coming feels like. With More...

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Aug 19, 2011

Lil' Grogan rated it:

Leonard! I'm not sure if I'm more shocked at all the sex in this book or that he's actually very funny....I think the latter.

Found it difficult and easy to read at the same time. Difficult because of certain forms of the experimental prose, the abundance of sex, the subject matter (particular in regards to the two native women). Easy because a lot of it was very funny, impertinent and there were moments that were beautifully written.

Most of the time I felt I was graspin More...

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Sep 29, 2007

Baiocco rated it:

You'd think this would be fucking devestating, but it's not. I love Leonard Cohen. Who doesn't? Maybe if he read this to me it would be different, because that deep voice really adds so much to his songs, but I just couldn't get into this save a few passages that were excellent.

Are there songwriters that can be good novelists? Maybe good poets, but most often not. I bet there are a lot of songwriters with ambitions of writing novels, but then they lay those ideas out, and thos More...

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Jan 05, 2009

Shane rated it:

I think that Cohen should stick to music where he is indeed the master. Although this book was considered a breakout in Canadian fiction, it did not hold me as a reader, the writing was too jarring and jerky (considered by others as artsy, perhaps) - I strained through the entire book, just because it was recommended reading and gave a loud sigh of relief when I finished it

4 comments like (1 person liked it)

Aug 06, 2011

Mark added it

I hated it so much I put it down 1/3 through it. Cohen's first 2 Columbia LP's are nothing less than Absolutely Great. But this book seems to have been written by a schizophrenic doppelganger. In 2 short words- It Sucks. Lame, sex-centric, hung-up, uses f-bombs et al apparently just for shock value, a cliche'd 60's device better served by Lenny Bruce, (who at least knew what he was doing) probably written under turns predominantly stoned or drunk... It just wasn't worth the time.

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