Beautiful Losers

I've just finished Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers (1966), a book which I'd meant to read since a trip to Montreal last year.

This experimental novel - parts Henry Miller, parts Djuna Barnes - is divided by four obsessions: history, form, sexuality, and place. These themes are woven - particularly in the first section of the book - into a complex tapestry built on a narrative voice that fluctuates in its paranoia and sense of loss. The voice is sometimes Cohen's, sometimes that of his nemesis, F.

Cohen's reverence for the past, his fear of F., and his fascination with the endless permutations of sexual exchange, dominates the second part of the novel, which establishes Montreal as a cold, but evocative place, one in which form wrestles with content to produce, well, to produce Beautiful Losers.

That this book is difficult to write about owes a considerable amount to the fact that its primary effect is the creation of an ethos, a sort of literary atmosphere. This atmospheric energy permeates Cohen's novel and is defined by its sadness and its quiet sense of hope. The first part of this book really is like Miller's Tropic of Capricorn, except set in the Great White North.

The final word is reserved for Cohen: "Don't be a magician," he writes. "Be magic."