Beautiful Losers KINDLE MOBI by Leonard Cohen H.A.

Beautiful Losers (first published 1966 -- this edition is 2009), is Cohen's second novel, and often referred to as an "experimental novel", but it has little in common with either the naive politicized revolutionary or drug/psychedelic style and mood of the 60's novels it is often categorized with. It is difficult to describe or summarise, yet is a novel of extraordinary power. Obscene, pornographic, incoherent, sick, Beautiful Losers is all of these, but it is also heartbreakingly beautiful, sad, haunted and elegiac. Much of 60s counter-culture is being rediscovered now, but this does more than any Jack Kerouac or Marshall McLuhan can do, and is more involving, weirder and ultimately more serious. It is about loneliness, freezing weather and a man at the edge of his reason, endlessly mourning his lost friend/lover, 'F' and his dead wife Edith whilst researching an obscure native American Saint, Katherine Tekakwitha (who has since been fully canonized to become Canada's and North America's first Native American Saint) in a squalid Montreal flat in the 1960s. It contains what I think is my favourite line of dialogue ever:
'What time is it, F?'
'It is the summer of 1964.'
Just like the title says: beautiful.