The Favourite Game - Hardcover

Cohen, Leonard

3.82

4,151 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0224619039 ISBN 13: 9780224619035

Publisher: Jonathan Cape Ltd, 1970

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The Favourite Game opens with the line, "Breavman knows a girl named Shell whose ears were pierced so she could wear the long filigree earrings." Like Suzanne in the Leonard Cohen song, Shell has touched a young man's body with her mind, but she wants to stake a claim to more than his flesh. Breavman is creating a Song of Songs to her glory superimposed on a lament over his inability to renounce his Jewish soul to her gentile body. The novel is steeped in biblical consciousness. Breavman is simultaneously a priest in Babylonian exile mourning the loss of King Solomon's glories and King David revelling carnally in the delights of a multitude of women, including this beguiling foreigner. Alternately depressed about the past that perished with his father's death and manic about all the young women he wants to bed, Breavman's story brims with the delightful incongruities and twisted harmonies of American Beauty. Like Lester in Mendes's movie, Breavman strives for distance from himself but can't help constantly imploding. He is both a self-mocking hero and a self-inflated villain in a story that has many orgasms but no climax. The effect is nearly as cinematic as American Beauty.

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Review:

"He is a writer of terrific energy and color, a Rabelaisian comic and a visualizer of memorable scenes." --The Observer
Is there any Canadian novel as compelling and as good as at capturing youthful anxieties as J. D. Salinger s Catcher in the Rye? Absolutely. . . . Leonard Cohen s first novel, The Favorite Game. Globe & Mail
The Favorite Game is a morally brave book, intimate and unflinching. . . . Leonard Cohen sustains the highest level of poetic craftsmanship throughout. Paul Quarrington
It is the kind of book that becomes a law unto itself, simply because there is nothing with which to compare it. Calgary Albertan"

About the Author:

Leonard Cohen s artistic career began in 1956 with the publication of his first book of poetry, Let Us Compare Mythologies. He has published two novels, The Favourite Game andBeautiful Losers, and eleven books of poetry, most recentlyStranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs, Book of Longing, andLeonard Cohen: Poems and Songs. He has to date released fourteen studio albums, the most recent of which, You Want It Darker, was released in 2016.Cohen was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2008, received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010, and was awarded the Glenn Gould Prize in 2011. Mr. Cohen died in 2016.

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