Editorial Review:
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One of the best-known experimental novels of the 1960s, Beautiful Losers is Cohen’s most defiant and uninhibited work. The novel centres upon the hapless members of a love triangle united by their sexual obsessions and by their fascination with Catherine Tekakwitha, the 17th-century Mohawk saint.
By turns vulgar, rhapsodic, and viciously witty, Beautiful Losers explores each character’s attainment of a state of self-abandonment, in which the sensualist cannot be distinguished from the saint.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
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Reader Reviews for Beautiful Losers:
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Customer Rating:  
Summary: Very Good!
Comment: Loved it! See also George and Condi: The Last Decayed: A Collection of Poems from the Last Decade Beaver Tales and a Canada Goosing: Poems Illustrating a Uniquely Canadian Perspective (See ArtisanPacificPublishing Website).
Customer Rating:
Summary: Irreverent despair
Comment: Written for the love of the word. I'm still trying to get the splinters out of my brain. What does it all amount to? What does it mean? I don't know but it was a beautiful ride.
Customer Rating:
Summary: "Catherine Tekakwitha, who are you?"
Comment: Beautiful Losers is the first-, second-, and third- person memoir of a soul-searching, saint-seeking historian who has let slip away everything that was important in his life: his childhood friend and fellow orphan, F., and his late wife, Edith. He desperately clings to the pursuit of knowledge while fighting with his memories; specifically, he thirsts for knowledge of an Iroqois saint with whom his wife had identified. Reading over his shoulder was F., who appeared disinterested and seemed to devote most of his energy to teaching our protagonist his lecherous ways, when he's not busy being lecherous or playing in the political arena. The actual events of the book center around the romantic and erotic history of the bittersweet love triangle, but you get the feeling that these encounters are beside the point, as their bond grows dangerously strong. As the narrator gets closer to the truth (and farther from resolution), he begins to unravel, and the reader is removed more and more from the nature of his thoughts, until we don't recognize him as himself any longer.
This story is told beautifully, with no word out of place, even if it does help if you can read French. (I can't.) I was turned inside out by sadness and longing, every moment I was reading it, but reading it was a tremendous reward in itself. Despite the cool, dark atmosphere and settings (a basement, a forest), there are rays of sunshine cutting through between the lines. I forgave the imagery and metaphors light-years beyond me and (I think) most of his audience, out of pure enjoyment. I hadn't any idea Leonard Cohen was a top-five sort of writer who can adeptly switch styles (nearly every segment is written differently than the one before) and carry a story that won't disappoint you.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Challenging and Beautiful
Comment: While Beautiful Losers is a fascinating read, it was not exactly a page turner for this reader. Yes, there are faults in my reading patterns, so I am sure that I should have gotten more from it, had I been able to concentrate fully... but this felt more like three hundred pages of poetry than it did a novel. Images were stunning, passages lyrical, images burned into my soul. Plot was convoluted and characters with only voice and little in the way of body filled the pages.
After my first experience with the authorship of Cohen, I will be sure to scour the used book store racks for more. I will buy them and hold them, and be ready to absorb myself in them fully before I take on the task of another of his books.
I like the challenge of books like this, but all readers should be ready to tackle the intricacies of Cohen before cracking one of his books. I'll be better prepared next time, I hope.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Cohen at his best...
Comment: Beautiful Losers is a fluid and sensual, humorous and absurd, lofty yet grounded in it's own universal despair. It is also one of the most beautifully written books out there.
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