FEBRUARY 2023 - AudioFile
Ottessa Moshfegh, author of several audiobooks, one of which she narrates, steps in to deliver this new production of the late Leonard Cohen’s early fiction, written in the 1950s. The 16 short stories and a novella are a snapshot of the period and the artist’s development of his voice. Cohen focuses on themes of violence, deeply intimate sex, rejection, the betrayals of old age, and more violence. Moshfegh's voice may be unexpected, given Cohen's many first-person male characters, but, curiously, it works. Moshfegh meets the moments of sexual intimacy, and of shocking violence, straight on, conveying a reverence for these early works. S.P.C. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine
Publishers Weekly
★ 08/22/2022
The late singer-songwriter and novelist Cohen (Beautiful Losers) leaves readers with an enthralling collection of work written in the 1950s and ’60s, as complex and dark as his lyrics. The unnamed narrator of the title novella is an aimless, solitary 35-year-old Montreal man who leads “an underground existence.” After the narrator learns his grandfather needs a place to live, he takes the older man in. It turns out the grandfather and narrator are ruthlessly violent—in one harrowing scene, the grandfather joins the narrator in beating the narrator’s girlfriend—and the story ends in a stunning reversal. In “O.K. Herb, O.K. Flo,” the narrator muses bitterly on Montreal’s cold surfaces: “All the stone you could want to fool yourself that life is substantial.” The narrator goes to a bar and meets a mediocre jazz player named Herb, who confides he’s going to convince his former lover, Flo, now married, to commit adultery. Herb passes out, leaving the narrator and Flo to discuss the situation. “Polly” follows a junior high girl who orders two younger children to do a variety of demeaning tasks in order for them to hear her play her recorder, such as taking out her trash. Cohen (1934–2016) writes brilliantly of desire and cruelty as his desperate characters yearn for connection. This is magnificent. (Oct.)
From the Publisher
Praise for A Ballet of Lepers:
“The writing captures all the gorgeous poeticism that we have come to love about his music, as well as a youthful naivete and a playfulness, a rawness that I wouldn't have predicted. There's something so fun in seeing where this all began.”—Ottessa Moshfegh, CNN
“Offer[s] nascent glimmers of [Cohen’s] inimitable artistic vision: intimate yet aloof, trembling with weakness even as it aches toward wisdom.”—Nathan Goldman, New York Times
“A fascinating collection of early fiction foreshadows motifs and concerns that Cohen the performer later mined across decades . . . A curious and compulsive examination of the boundaries of honesty and cruelty.”—Tim Adams, Guardian
“Brooding, bitter and cut with potent humour, the great singer’s unpublished early fiction reads like the work of a young Saul Bellow . . . Like some unexpected gift from a bright boy we thought we’d buried.”—Christian Lorentzen, Telegraph
“Cohen has a knack for keen observation and surprising renderings of human nature—quiet shifts that he can describe like weather patterns . . . If Cohen doesn’t lift you off the ground in this telling, then it remains a gift, as always, to be in his presence as he strives.”—Sam Sodomsky, The Nation
“A Ballet of Lepers, the novella, is the most substantial work in the volume, an existential exploration of violence and beauty, love and cruelty, obsession and renunciation. The piece itself is spare and taut . . . Carries a flair which, even in a work this early, is recognizably Cohen’s own . . . [Creates] a blueprint for the decades of work to follow.”—Robert J. Wiersema, Toronto Star
“An astonishingly deft and confident work of juvenilia.”—Irene Katz Connelly, Forward
“Cohen’s life and art have been dissected for years, but as this revealing volume proves, there are still new shades of him to discover.”—Adrienne Westenfeld, Esquire
“An enthralling collection of work written in the 1950s and ’60s, as complex and dark as [Cohen’s] lyrics . . . Cohen writes brilliantly of desire and cruelty as his desperate characters yearn for connection. This is magnificent.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“For the Cohen obsessive, there are fascinating glimpses into his self-fashioning.”—Toby Litt, Guardian, “Book of the Day”
“Leonard Cohen, who died in late 2016, was known as one of the most literate and accomplished songwriters of the modern era. Now comes this marvelous collection, written between 1956 and 1961, of short fiction, a radio play, and a novel . . . Many tales are set in his native Montreal, but in their execution and interpretation of the human condition, they are universal and even familiar . . . The Leonard Cohen we know from his songs is here, too, in his precocious way of telling a story (especially the ones that touch on physical frailty and the indignity of aging), and, overall, in the intoxicating way his words flow across the page. Cohen was a wordsmith of the first order.”—Booklist
Praise for Leonard Cohen and The Flame: Poems Notebooks Lyrics Drawings:
“There are very, very few people who occupy the ground that Leonard Cohen walks on. This is our Shelley, this is our Byron.”—Bono
“A posthumous balm . . . All of Cohen’s work has a raw, straight-to-the-heart intensity―reach for this the next time you need inspiration for a wedding toast that will leave them gutted, or any other moment you need a little sustenance for the soul.”—Vogue
“Cohen’s final volume shows his poetic soul. If you know the man only because of ‘Hallelujah’ or ‘Suzanne,’ pick up The Flame and warm yourself within its pages.”—Washington Post
“A kind of farewell tribute by the poet-prophet [and] offers ample evidence of his abiding sense of humor . . . Though he claimed not to know the origins of his poetry nor to be able to locate his mission, what Cohen offered his many fans and followers was the opportunity to partake of the kind of spiritual experience that makes it possible for us to feel, if only for a moment, that we are not alone.”―Los Angeles Review of Books
“Grand . . . Elegant . . . Leonard Cohen does not use language to pose, startle or to reinvent. Words are his old comrades, and see him through to the end.”—Observer
“In The Flame, an aging artist struggles with questions of death and legacy―and tries not to take them too seriously, true to his claim never to do so . . . If [this is] how long it takes to say ‘so long’ to someone beautiful, we’ll be listening to Cohen―still smirking and smiling―for decades to come, with this collection as our companion.”—Spectator
“Poignant and brave, lit up with flashes of anger, this is a luminous collection and classic Cohen.”―Booklist (starred review)
“Cohen was a poet before he was a musician, and with this posthumous collection his career completes its circle.”—Financial Times (Best Books of 2018)
“Steeped in somber reckoning . . . Full of gestures so intimate it’s almost a voyeuristic experience . . . The work feels both like a final speech and a disrobing . . . One can’t help but feel privy to something raw and shining, both uncomfortably and movingly revealing, the final laying-bare of a unique chronicler of the human heart.”—BookPage
Library Journal
05/01/2022
Including 15 short stories, a radio play, and an unpublished novel, this collection of literary work by legendary musician Cohen sums up the themes seen in his songs: longing and desire, a relentless battle with one's demons, and a questioning of one's worth.
FEBRUARY 2023 - AudioFile
Ottessa Moshfegh, author of several audiobooks, one of which she narrates, steps in to deliver this new production of the late Leonard Cohen’s early fiction, written in the 1950s. The 16 short stories and a novella are a snapshot of the period and the artist’s development of his voice. Cohen focuses on themes of violence, deeply intimate sex, rejection, the betrayals of old age, and more violence. Moshfegh's voice may be unexpected, given Cohen's many first-person male characters, but, curiously, it works. Moshfegh meets the moments of sexual intimacy, and of shocking violence, straight on, conveying a reverence for these early works. S.P.C. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2022-07-08
Previously unpublished early fiction by the iconic singer/songwriter, mostly domestic tales of love and loss.
Composed between 1956 and '61, the stories in this collection by Cohen (1934-2016) showcase a writer heavily under the sway of the Beats and existentialists, usually with young male protagonists heavily under the sway of others. The narrator of the short title novel is compelled to clear space in his Montreal apartment for his grandfather, a boorish man prone to spitting, physical assault, and other bodily offenses. Rather than be repulsed by this behavior, the narrator finds it oddly liberating and pursues a series of humiliations and abasements. The mood is one of warmed-over Sartre, with proclamations of life as a theater of cruelty (“How sad and beautiful we were, we humans with our suffering and our torturing”), topped off with a facile comic plot twist. The 16 additional stories are generally miniatures, curiosity pieces, and linguistic experiments featuring prostitutes, jazz musicians, sullen lovers, another boorish grandfather, and other hard-luck types; a series of stories feature Mister Euemer a milquetoast suburbanite who is alternately humiliated by a neighborhood boy and by his wife, who in one story is oddly obsessive about shaving. There are flickers of the wry, sensitive tone that marks Cohen's song lyrics, as in “Lullaby,” a Bellovian story about Euemer’s impending fatherhood, “Short Story on Greek Island,” about a relationship between a pair of expats, and “Trade,” about a young man and woman sharing stories about their stints in a psychiatric ward. Still, had these pieces appeared in their time, they likely would’ve been seen as also-rans compared to Kerouac, Selby, and Bukowski. Today, they largely read like the juvenilia of a writer whose best work is still ahead of him.
Cohen’s greatness is largely obscured in these atmospheric, derivative early drafts.
