Beautiful Losers Summary
Leonard Cohen

Beautiful Losers Summary

Beautiful Losers by Leonard Cohen is a stream-of-consciousness story of an unnamed folklorist living in a psycho-sexual hell. Having lost his wife and male lover, he turns to the history of an Iroquois saint for his salvation. The novel is a depiction of spiritual yearning in the orgiastic humanistic days of the mid-sixties.

In the first book, The History of Them All, the nameless narrator researches Catherine Tekakwitha, a nearly-sainted Iroquois from the seventeen century. He has lost the two people he loves: his wife Edith and his childhood friend F. He had a sexual affair with both, but only after Edith's suicide did he learn that she and F. slept together. Now, the narrator masturbates frequently, suffers crippling constipation and no longer bathes, refusing to leave his apartment in Montreal.

After Edith's death, F. - who is a libertine, Member of Parliament, and general bully - proceeds to put... View more of the Beautiful Losers Summary