Beautiful Losers
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Beautiful Losers is a novel by Leonard Cohen. Published in 1966 by McClelland and Stewart, it was the Canadian novelist-poet's second novel, and precedes his career as a singer-songwriter. It is noted as being perhaps Cohen's most defiant and uninhibited work, and is also one of the best-known experimental novels to be published during the 1960s.
Beautiful Losers was one of the selected novels in the 2005 edition of Canada Reads, where it was originally to be read by singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright, though tour commitments meant that Wainright had to be replaced by singer Molly Johnson.
[edit] Plot
At the centre of the novel are the members of a love triangle, united by their obsessions and fascination with a mythic seventeenth-century Mohawk blessed, Tekakwitha. The triangle is made up of the unnamed narrator, an authority on the vanishing A------ tribe, his wife Edith, one of the last surviving members of the tribe, and their maniacal and domineering friend, F.
The novel is sometimes vulgar, sometimes rhapsodic, and sometimes bitingly witty, as it explores the particular brand of self-abandonment each character adopts, whereby the sensualist becomes indistinguishable from the saint. Comical, disturbing, and fiercely moving, Beautiful Losers is a classic of Canadian literature.
[edit] References
- Eugene Benson and William Toye, eds. The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature, Second Edition. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1997: 220-221. ISBN 0-19-541167-6
- Canada Reads 2005
