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A review by kirstiecat
Beautiful Losers by Leonard Cohen
3.0
Leonard Cohen walks a precarious tightrope balancing the sacred and the profane and, because he is *the* Leonard Cohen, doesn't fall from his great height. At the same time, it is very disjointed and a little unclear. It's an exploration of sexuality but way more than that. Though Beautiful Losers is perhaps Cohen's most well known and highly appraised novel, I liked "The Favorite Game" better. Some memorable quotes from this one:
"Jealousy is the education you have chosen"
"Ordinary eternal machinery like the grinding of the stars."
(p.33)
"You don't polish windows in a car wreck:
(p.40)
"I'm tired of facts. I'm tired of speculations. I want to be consumed by unreason."
(p.46)
"The hospitals have drawers of Cancer which they do not own."
"Nausea is an earthquake in your eye"
"Even the world has a body."
"We are all of us tormented with your glory."
(p.54)
"Steam coming off the planet, clouds of fleecy steam as boy and girl populations clash in religious riots, hot and whistling like a graveyard sodomist our little planet embraces its fragile yo-yo destiny, tuned in the secular mind like a dying engine."
(p. 150)
"In Montréal, spring is like an autopsy. Everyone wants to see the inside of the frozen mammoth"
(p.229)
"Above him on the electric wires perched the first crows of the year, arranged between the poles like abacus beads."
(p. 234)
"Quickly now, as if even he participated in the excitement over the unknown, he greedily assembled himself into-into a movie of Ray Charles. Then he enlarged the screen, degree by degree like a documentary on the Industry. The moon occupied one lens of his sunglasses, and he laid out his piano keys across a shelf of the sky, and leaned over him as though they were truly the row of giant fishes to feed a hungry multitude. A fleet of jet planes dragged his voice over us who were holding hands."
(p.242)
"Jealousy is the education you have chosen"
"Ordinary eternal machinery like the grinding of the stars."
(p.33)
"You don't polish windows in a car wreck:
(p.40)
"I'm tired of facts. I'm tired of speculations. I want to be consumed by unreason."
(p.46)
"The hospitals have drawers of Cancer which they do not own."
"Nausea is an earthquake in your eye"
"Even the world has a body."
"We are all of us tormented with your glory."
(p.54)
"Steam coming off the planet, clouds of fleecy steam as boy and girl populations clash in religious riots, hot and whistling like a graveyard sodomist our little planet embraces its fragile yo-yo destiny, tuned in the secular mind like a dying engine."
(p. 150)
"In Montréal, spring is like an autopsy. Everyone wants to see the inside of the frozen mammoth"
(p.229)
"Above him on the electric wires perched the first crows of the year, arranged between the poles like abacus beads."
(p. 234)
"Quickly now, as if even he participated in the excitement over the unknown, he greedily assembled himself into-into a movie of Ray Charles. Then he enlarged the screen, degree by degree like a documentary on the Industry. The moon occupied one lens of his sunglasses, and he laid out his piano keys across a shelf of the sky, and leaned over him as though they were truly the row of giant fishes to feed a hungry multitude. A fleet of jet planes dragged his voice over us who were holding hands."
(p.242)