At last. I finally had the chance to finish reading Beautiful Losers while coming back from picking up our donkeys in Idaho to bring them home to Oregon. The 7-hour trip was uneventful except for my worrying whether the donkeys were hot, hungry, thirsty, scared, car sick, or worse- had somehow burst through the metal door of the trailer. Finishing Beautiful Losers was a perfect distraction.
First off, let’s get the whole debacle of Argentina out of the way. I am not sure whether that was a sex scene, a comic interlude, or maybe just drug-induced rambling. I am also not sure of the purpose of it all. In fact I am not sure of the purpose of Mr. F in general. It is apparent throughout the book that he is central to the theme and direction of the book, but I didn’t care for him much. I am obviously missing something. I loved Leonard’s tongue-in-cheek story telling style and the humor that he wove here and there among the various forms of stimulation and torture that ended in orgasm or lack of one as the case may be. The Jesuit torture scene was disturbing, not so much because it was horrible (of course it was horrible, it was torture), but because it gave the scene the flavour of a bad acid trip. I did love towards the end of the Argentina episode (page 180 in my edition), where Leonard describes the night... “How soft the night seemed, like the last verse of a lullaby.” Again a master of mood!
I do have to say that if I were a young woman meeting Leonard Cohen after this book came out, and if he were to approach me for a romantic interlude; I would have been scared to death. I would have gone through with it, of course (right?
), but I would have been very intimidated and convinced that he would regret his decision and be bored to death by me. It is hard to equate this aspect of him to the man Jennifer Warnes was speaking about when she described him as having, “… overwhelming gentleness...”
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/mu ... story.html
Back to the story…. Although I liked the first half of the book better than the second half, I thought the story of Tekakwitha in Book Two was very interesting and wondered how much of it was true. From the little I have read about her, it appears to be true for the most part. I did miss hearing from our hero again in Book Two, and I wrongly assumed the epilogue would be about him. I did love the beginning of Book Three though, where Leonard describes the coming of spring and how it “sneaks into Quebec, into our villages, between our birch trees.” His description of how bright and fleeting spring is in Montreal was some of my favorite writing in the book. But the ending itself, in fact most of the epilogue, was a disappointment for me. Maybe I just didn’t get it. I feel a little like the Emperor in the scene from Amadeus, where after listening to one of Mozart’s compositions, he says,
EMPEROR: It's very good. Of course now and then - just now and then - it gets a touch elaborate.
MOZART: What do you mean, Sire?
EMPEROR: Well, I mean occasionally it seems to have, how shall one say? [he stops in difficulty; turning to Orsini-Rosenberg] How shall one say, Director?
ORSINI-ROSENBERG: Too many notes, Your Majesty?
EMPEROR: Exactly. Very well put. Too many notes.
MOZART: I don't understand. There are just as many notes, Majesty, as are required. Neither more nor less.
EMPEROR: My dear fellow, there are in fact only so many notes the ear can hear in the course of an evening. I think I'm right in saying that, aren't I, Court Composer?
SALIERI: Yes! yes! er, on the whole, yes, Majesty.
MOZART: But this is absurd!
EMPEROR: My dear, young man, don't take it too hard. Your work is ingenious. It's quality work. And there are simply too many notes, that's all. Cut a few and it will be perfect.
MOZART: Which few did you have in mind, Majesty?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCud8H7z7vU
That scene always made me laugh. I empathize with both Mozart and the Emperor. Mozart was a genius and burned with the kind of fire most of us can only warm our hands to, while the emperor struggles with a lack of understanding that trips us all up from time to time.
For now… I will move on to The Energy of Slaves.
Vickie