Novel
Beautiful Losers
Leonard Cohen · 1966
Synopsis
Montreal, the sixties. A nameless folklorist, a specialist in an almost extinct tribe that the book designates by a letter, ruminates on the life of his wife Edith, the last of this people, and on that of his friend F., a separatist member of parliament, who was the lover of both of them. He also questions a third life, that of Catherine Tekakwitha, a young Iroquois woman converted in the seventeenth century and dead at twenty-four. Prayers, advertisements, letters, obscenities and history textbooks run together in a single stream.
Context
The author wrote this book on Hydra, imposing fasting and amphetamines on himself, and collapsed once the manuscript was finished. Published in New York and Toronto in 1966, it was received as a provocation: Robert Fulford, in the Toronto Star, held it to be the most revolting book ever written in Canada, while judging it probably the most interesting of the year. It sold poorly, and the author's career as a singer later brought it readers. The young Iroquois woman was canonised in 2012.
Who it is for
A difficult novel, without a continuous plot, obscene in places; one has to be willing to get lost in a text that mixes every register.
Prizes and reception
It sold poorly when it appeared and has become one of the best-known experimental novels of the sixties, carried by its author's fame.
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