Beautiful Losers (Masterplots II: American Fiction Series, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Leonard Cohen
- First Published: 1966
- Type of Plot: Stream of consciousness
- Time of Work: The mid-1960’s
- Setting: Montreal, Canada
- Principal Characters: The narrator, F., Edith, Catherine Tekakwitha
- Genres: Long fiction, Psychological fiction
- Subjects: Sin or Original sin, Religion, Spiritual life or spirituality, Women, Human behavior, Men
- Locales: Montreal, Canada
The Novel
Beautiful Losers is divided into three books. In book 1, the narrator speaks. In book 2, F. writes to the narrator. Book 3 is “An Epilogue in the Third Person.” Book 2 fills in gaps (though only for the reader) in the narrator’s story; the epilogue shows the speakers of books 2 and 3 as old men. Cohen once remarked of the writing of this novel that he had to “write or die”; the book is a fictional portrait of one very dark time of the author’s soul.
The constipated, oversexed narrator of book 1 speaks from the vantage point of a man who has...
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