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 leonar [...]

COLPO DI SOLEI set cinematografici sono luoghi di raro cinismo, permeati di spirito da caserma. Una battuta ricorrente è dire a un altro che sta facendo due film insieme: il primo e ultimo. Gran bell’incoraggiamento.Il parallelo nasce dal fatto che alcuni critici classificano questo come il secondo romanzo di Cohen, altri invece come l’ultimo.Leonard Cohen scrisse due romanzi, questo è il secondo. E in effetti, dopo non ce ne sono stati altri.Li scrisse più di cinquanta anni fa – questo [...]

"I don't need a reasonFor what I becameI've got these excusesThey're tired and lameI don't need a pardon, no, no, no, no, noThere's no one left to blameI'm leaving the tableI'm out of the gameI'm leaving the tableI'm out of the game"Leonard Cohen's last song. Died 7 Nov 2016 in the same year Bowie and Prince died.

When I heard of Leonard Cohen's death I thought it would be the perfect moment to finally tackle Beautiful Losers. As it is written on the first page dedication, I received the book as a birthday gift in 2005. It has been sitting on my bookshelf for more than 10 years, waiting for me to give it a chance. A chance was given but I could not make it past page 50. This is the craziest shit I have ever read. Violent, sexual, nonsensical gibberish and the obsession for Catherine Tekakwitha, the 17th-c [...]

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 [...]

He sentenced me to twenty pages of boredom.I feel about her as many of my readers must feel about pretty Negresses who sit across from them in the subway, their thin hard legs shooting down from what pink secrets. (p17)rolls eyesWhy is it only now, years past, my prick rises up at the vision of her standing there so absurdly painted, her breasts dark as eggplants, her face resembling Al Jolson? (p18)drops book forever

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. Still, the Fiat Uno of my parents cou [...]

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 apart. In t [...]

Personally I think the crude language and sex jokes were a bit over-the-top (and I've read some pretty explicit books before so I should know), but otherwise, this 1960's set classic is an amazing novel capturing an era of great social change and the story of a few people experiencing the sexual revolution.

My completely random musings on Beautiful Losers, not to be mistaken for my otherwise musings which tend to actually have some through line. Humans are at their core all animalistic. It is society which shapes us, lacquers us, and tells us to hide those natures like a dirty little secret. This book is completely unapologetically sensual. Completely uninhibited which, amusingly, is probably why I like it so much. There is way too many microscopic sexual definitions out there. Why is it that we, a [...]

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 Kateri Tekakawitha [...]

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 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 book before. Cohen [...]

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 during some extended hookah sessio [...]

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?Jesus, Mary, and Joseph in [...]

I didn't get this novel. For most of the time I spent reading it the meaning of the text evaded me. Cohen is doing a lot of things here, and they are very interesting and postmodern—sacred and profane chafing against one another—but I didn't always feel secure in this reading. I think this is productive, not negative. I felt extremely unsettled throughout, at times repulsed and horrified, but was very interested in what Cohen was saying about Canada and its history. I think this book require [...]

Leonard Cohen has always charmed the socks off of me. Beautiful Losers is stunning, intimate, crass and hugely insightful.

thank you, mr. cohen, for making me have to get off in the bathroom of muldoon's diner in wolverine, michigan on a road trip to my mom's with my boyfriend and his parents.

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 fucking and wailing [...]

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 am no [...]

The grubby, rude, glitzy, 60s Beat-like novel that we, the humans with souls, can play with. Tastes masochistic and discomfiting, like Kerouac or Bukowski, but without the self-indulgence and isolatingly intense hatred of women. For the self-flagellating Montrealais (is there any other kind of Montrealais?) or those who aspire to be.

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 [...]

This is a strange book. Some of the prose is beautiful, the ideas are far out, and yetI am not sure I like it very much. There's one scene that is so ugly both in what happens and then what the narrator thinks about it that it is what swims into view every time I think about this book, and I can't get away from it. So despite the part where I kind of enjoy the far-out prose and the sentient vibrator orgy, I am sour on the book as a whole.Note: The rest of this review has been withheld due to the [...]

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, a recently deceased wife and a broken, lonely man, is beautifully (if not grotesquely) told. Reminicisent of Joyce's wordplay and windin interior monologue, this novel is a tapestry is weaved of sex and regret, hallucinatory buddhist rambling [...]

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 [...]

ιδιοφυΐα Leonard!review στη δεύτερη ανάγνωση.

f R e E J Az ZДобре че обичам free jazz. Иначе книгата сигурно щеше да ми е съвсем непоносима. Тя е като издивяващите музиканти на сцената, които или те вбесяват с изчанчеността си, или и ти отнасяш с тях във free-то. Затова еднакво приех отзивите за тази книга с една звезда и с пет звез� [...]

I am biased. I can’t be objective when it comes to Cohen. I just can’t. When I picked up the book, I expected it to be melancholy, spiritual and deep. And at times it is very sad, at times it is spiritual. It’s funny at some parts and grotesque at others. But most importantly, it is bizarre. Leonard Cohen has the amazing gift of talking about shit and making it sound like poetry (which he literally does in this book). So when I’m reading about the “telephone dance”, about animated se [...]

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 songwriter and a poet with real skill: a unique voice, an exce [...]

Aynı zamanda müzisyen olan Leonard Cohen, tam bir yok olmuş adam. Zaten böyle olmasaydı müzikleri bize bu kadar iyi gelmezdi. Bence şarkı söylemeli sadece ya da ben bundan 7-8 yıl öncesine dönüp okuyayım ve seveyim bu kitabını

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 have chosen""Ordinary eternal machi [...]