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List Price: $14.95 | | Publisher: Vintage
Salesrank: 89742
Released: November 2, 1993 |
| Our Price: $8.24 |
| Used Price: $6.74 |
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| Media: Paperback |
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Editorial Review:
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 Paperback edition.
Beautiful Losers Reviews:
not very good shape 
2008-09-02 - The book was rated as very good condition, but it was yellow and soiled and not very good in my opinion.
If you act like you "get" all of this, you're a liar 
2008-07-21 - Cohen throws us stuff he thinks of and puts it down and no one gets it but him, in this, well, instead of prosaic poem we've got a poetic prosaic work of literature and it's like... a long poem, but, it's not nearly as good as Cohen's poems, this book lacks, great ideas, injecting holy water, how great, he caught "them" doing it... how F is ruined by all of his sexual endeavors - there's great stuff here but having it written down in prosaic form does not allow it to be great. Cohen said recently, Pick it up at a certain spot if you want to - see, you don't even have to start from the beginning. I think it's amazing he did it, but at the same time, well, I just bought Cohen's new album, "Dear, Heather" - I don't want to hear songs about "Nine Eleven" - I feel their contrived, but when Cohen blatantly does it - "On that day" -
They hate us of old
Our women unveiled
Our slaves and our gold
I wouldn't know
I'm just holding the fort
But answer me this
I won't take you to court
Did you go crazy
Or did you report
On that day
On that day
They wounded New York
At his age, producing this brilliance shows that he'll go down in history as big as friggin' Plato.
A Searing & Ecstatic Vision 
2006-09-14 - "Beautiful Losers" merges the profane with the sacred to create an unforgettable, disturbing and wildly elated vision. Using masterful stream-of-consciousness, Leonard Cohen breaks the barriers: nothing is off-limits, nothing is too precious, nothing is too spiritual. Everything, including all forms of erotic acts, will be desecrated on these pages: but none of the writing is gratuitous. With every blasphemous thought and image, we are drawn into an ecstatic spiritual quest, such that in the midst of an insanely orgasmic scene, replete with blood, violence, debilitating pleasure, we find this treasure:
("O Father, Nameless and Free of Description, lead me from the Desert of the Possible. Too long I have dealt with Events. Too long I labored to become an Angel. I chased Miracles with a bag of Power to salt their wild Tails. I tried to dominate Insanity so I could steal its Information. I tried to program the Computers with Insanity. I tried to create Grace to prove that Grace e isted. ... We could not see Evidence stretched our Memories. Dear Father, accept this confession: we did not train ourselves to Receive because we believed there wasn't Anything to Receive and we could not endure with this Belief.")
At the center of the novel is the unforgettable "F", the great iconoclast, the sexualist searching for the divine experience, the man who betrays with joy, who gives and receives pain with bliss, who howls out his darkness in a search for light.
Readers who relate to "Beautiful Losers" may also be open to "Miss MacIntosh My Darling", "Art and Lies", and (of course) Satre's "No Exit." Still, to see such roaring poetry and prose bundled into a novel is rare, and "Beautiful Losers" is one-of-a-kind.
Cohen the Novelist
2006-05-26 - Having avoided Leonard Cohen for so long, lumping him with the "classic rock" I found annoying, I'm now in the midst of a serious Leonard Cohen Obsession by way of a Jeff Buckley cover and then this massively brilliant, inspired and dense, genuis, pornographic, and simply awesome novel. The language in this book is so alive, you would think it would grow flesh on the page. Any passage rivals Henry Miller, James Joyce, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. If you're looking for a plot-driven page turner, go elsewhere. This is the stuff of serious linguistic revelry, for people who like to read books that make you jealous that he wrote it, and you didn't.
Like: Days without work. Why did that list depress me? I should never have made the list. I've done something bad to your belly, Edith. I tried to use it. I tried to use your belly against the Plague. I tried to be a man in a padded locker room telling a beautiful smutty story to eternity. I tried to be an emcee in a tuxedo arousing a lodge of honeymooners, my bed full of golf windows. I forgot that I was desperate. I forgot that I began this research in desperation. My briefcase fooled me. My tidy notes led me astray. I thought I was doing a job.
Or: Oh God, Your Morning Is Perfect. People Are Alive In Your World. I Can Hear The Little Children In The Elevator. The Airplane Is Flying Through The Original Blue. Mouths Are Eating Breakfast. The Radio Is Filled With Electricity. The Trees Are Excellent.
[It goes on for two pages like this, beautiful, perfect.]
So, I would have to say that I give this an effusive six out of five stars.
And, I should add, Leonard Cohen is NOT dead! He is a Zen monk. Where are the novels that he was supposed to write for us? He was cheated out of his retirement fund by an ex-wife/manager. You should buy this book so he can retire comfortably, as he should, one of the great genuises of the English language that has been overshadowed by the filthy stupidity of the rock industry of America.
The end !
this is hard to write... but not as hard to read as this book
2006-02-11 - I ordered this and The Favorite Game, taking advantage of Amazons buy two and get a deal policy.
I didn't like this book at all. It doesn't feel as natural as Favorite Game, it doesn't flow like FG and doesn't delieve like FG.
I don't know what Mister Cohen was trying to accomplish... James Joyce or Henry Miller lost generation of Montreal?
The only reason I gave this two stars instead of one is solely on my adoration of the author.
