Beautiful Losers
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Beautiful Losers | |
|---|---|
 Paperback edition of Beautiful Losers |
|
| Author | Leonard Cohen |
| Cover artist | Suan Mitchell and Lee Friedman |
| Country | Canada |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | experimental novel; literary fiction |
| Publisher | Vintage; Reissue edition (November 2, 1993) |
| Publication date | 1966 |
| Published in English |
1966 |
| Pages | 256 pages |
| ISBN | 978-0679748250 |
| OCLC Number | 28065898 |
| Dewey Decimal | 813/.54 20 |
| LC Classification | PR9199.3.C57 B4 1993 |
| Preceded by | The Favourite Game |
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,[citation needed] 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 Wainwright had to be replaced by singer Molly Johnson.
[edit] Plot summary
At the centre of the novel are the members of a love triangle, united by their obsessions and fascination with a seventeenth-century Mohawk blessed, Kateri 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, who may or may not exist.
The novel is sometimes coarse, rhapsodic and bitingly witty, as it explores the particular brand of self-abandonment each character adopts, whereby the sensualist becomes indistinguishable from the saint. Beautiful Losers is considered a masterpiece of Canadian literature, and, according to Linda Hutcheon, the first "postmodern" Canadian novel.
[edit] References
 |
This article includes a list of references, related reading or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations. Please improve this article by introducing more precise citations where appropriate. (August 2009) |
- 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
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
