- Beautiful Losers
Infobox Book
name = Beautiful Losers
image_caption = Paperback edition of "Beautiful Losers"
author =Leonard Cohen
cover_artist = Suan Mitchell and Lee Friedman
country = Canada
language = English
genre = experimental novel; literary fiction
publisher = Vintage; Reissue edition (November 2, 1993)
release_date = 1966
english_release_date = 1966
pages = 256 pages
isbn = 978-0679748250
preceded_by =The Favourite Game "Beautiful Losers" is a
novel byLeonard Cohen . Published in 1966 byMcClelland and Stewart , it was the Canadian novelist-poet's second novel, and precedes his career as asinger-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-songwriterRufus Wainwright , though tour commitments meant that Wainright had to be replaced bysinger Molly Johnson .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 Canadian literature classic.
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
* [http://www.cbc.ca/canadareads/cr_2005/index.html Canada Reads 2005]
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