A Ballet of Lepers

Starred review from August 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.

October 1, 2022
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 (although it is more a novella in length). Many tales are set in his native Montreal, but in their execution and interpretation of the human condition, they are universal and even familiar. Indeed, much of what the young Cohen writes about here is what obsessed him throughout his long life, themes of love (in all of its manifestations but especially erotic love), family, freedom, language, Jewish identity, and, perhaps, his ultimate but unattainable goal, reaching for some kind of transcendence. 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.

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August 1, 2022
Previously unpublished early fiction by the iconic singer/songwriter, mostly domestic tales of love and loss.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.

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