The Favourite Game

This is quite possibly my favorite book. As a fan of Mister Cohen and the city of Montreal, I loved this book. Mind you this was written before his musical career. You can actually see some of the songs forming way before they were committed to tape. That being said, I love Cohen's Montreal, the late night drives, the small little dives and parks. Also this is Cohen's best expample of wrestling with his Jewishness. Simply an amazing book and an amazing read. If you like Salinger, Cohen's music or the city of Montreal itself, you need to read this.

The Favorite Game is the book I should have picked up before reading Beautiful Losers. It is as if the stylistic experiments Cohen attempted in his second novel make far more sense now. However, having said this I must add that this is the more entertaining and enjoyable work. This book is about romance. It is always entertaining to hear people talk about love, affection, adoration even fixation as being something only people can have for one another. Lawrence Breavman (the protagonist) feels this way about his life and the many persons and places that populate it. Lisa, Tamara, Shell and the city of Montreal, all are adored by this young man. He loves his best friend Krantz with whom he begins an empassioned dialogue unveiling the many layers of Montreal and Quebecois life oscillating around him in both the city and out in the Laurentian highlands. Breavman truly treats the world as "other." It is beautiful to witness. There is mysticism in this work. The way Breavman notices the angles of sunlight on his beloved mountain, the colors of the surface of the Saint Lawrence and then the Hudson. The park that he walks through each night and protects. The color of the snow under the moonlight and the sound it gives off when he and a young Lisa are walking home from Hebrew School. Each of these things is as vivid as the young man's search for a partner, for sexual fulfillment. As in Cohen's later work, beauty and grotesqueness and filth coexist and are both the possession of his protagonist's soul. Breavman wanders endlessly through his city (Montreal) taking in every detail he can. His friend Krantz acknowledges -one summer night- that they would walk endlessly and never sleep if they were to follow Breavman's whims, his aesthetic eye, the contours of his persistent and ever unfolding dialogue. This is a beautiful story. Like James Joyce, Cohen has taken up the development of the young artist's personal aesthetic sense (and appetite). Joyce made the distinction between "fetishism" and admiration for beauty in The Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man. Stephen Daedalus didn't want to possess beauty, he wanted to really learn how to admire it, appreciate it, recreate it if he could. Lawrence Breavman wants to appreciate beauty as well and he moves beyond merely desiring to possess what he sees. He may pause and admire the infinite little details of being in the world, but he learns to never possess but to engage. His dialogue is an engagement with beauty that, interestingly, supersedes his literary career. The young man, like Stephen Daedalus, is an emerging artist. But his dialogue is what Cohen cares about and his peregrinations, his questions and escapades are all the real art. Stephen Daedalus learned that he could recreate the world in his imagination and then place this on paper and by doing so, would have done his aesthetic duty, would have engaged the world. In Cohen's account, we see the artist as wanderer, as more than reticent observer. B

I was forced to read this book in my English 101 in college. Having only known Leonard Cohen by reputation, I was reticent of reading it but I did because I had to. At the end, though, I learned to appreciate this book because everything made sense and I started relating to his character. It's quite touching. Having seen Ghost World about a year after, it reminded me of this book, same basic, same principal of being disappointed by the poeple you care about and not being able to accept those changes. I suggest you read this book, it's a good read and a good intrusion into the mind of a little boy growing up.

As a woman in her mid-twenties this has been quite a revelation for me. It has opened my eyes in so many ways with regard to men and their nature, and I mean this in a kind and tender way. Growing up I have passed myself through many of the stages that Lawrence is going through, from the sexual awakening to the loss of spiritual innocence, yet the occasional paragraphs to which I cannot instantly relate make for the key to the enigmatic difference between man and woman. A must for any passionate of human nature.

What a genius Lenny is! Having struggled through the wild magnificence of Beautiful Losers, this novel was a breeze... Each sentence is amazing. Not a single word is wasted. This IS the essence of Leonard Cohen. I love his music, but his written word is something else. This is an intense, honest, and poetic novel. It is art.