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The Favorite Game |  | Author: Leonard Cohen
Publisher: Vintage
Category: Book
List Price: $14.95
Buy New: $8.37
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New (36) Used (14) from $8.37
Seller: pbshopus
Rating:  16 reviews
Sales Rank: 93470
Media: Paperback
Pages: 256
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.2 x 0.6
ISBN: 1400033624
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9781400033621
ASIN: 1400033624
Publication Date: October 14, 2003
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Features:
| • | ISBN13: 9781400033621 | | • | Condition: NEW | | • | Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark. |
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Product Description
In this unforgettable novel, Leonard Cohen boldly etches the youth and early manhood of Lawrence Breavman, only son of an old Jewish family in Montreal. Life for Breavman is made up of dazzling colour – a series of motion pictures fed through a high-speed projector: the half-understood death of his father; the adult games of love and war, with their infinite capacity for fantasy and cruelty; his secret experiments with hypnotism; the night-long adventures with Krantz, his beloved comrade and confidant. Later, achieving literary fame as a college student, Breavman does penance through manual labour, but ultimately flees to New York. And although he has loved the bodies of many women, it is only when he meets Shell, whom he awakens to her own beauty, that he discovers the totality of love and its demands, and comes to terms with the sacrifices he must make.
From the Paperback edition.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 16
 Writes woman so well November 13, 2008
A. Mikel Baudin
Leonard Cohen, who is also my son's namesake, writes so beautifully, so provocatively that one can scarcely consume the immense emotion. And at the same time his verse is so free the feelings flow in and out of you simultaneously... as if they were meant to occupy your souls most primal depths. This book will find you wherever you are. Reaching into your past and present to show you the sides of every relationship you never knew you had. Brilliant.
 Leonard Cohen, Great Poet and Songwriter; Mediocre Novelist May 2, 2008
G. Sorin (New Paltz, NY USA)
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
I love listening to Leonard Cohen's music (even sung by others)and his poetry is an intriguing synthesis of the accessible and the cryptic. This novel, however, within which there are genuine flashes of insight and poignancy, ultimately falls flat. The central protagonist doesn't change much -- which I suspect is Leonard's point. But, this we get right away. Also scenes with the protagonist's Jewish mother are way over the top -- but they do anticipate Philip Roth's Sophie Portnoy.
Lovely May 6, 2007
Karl Consiglio (Malta)
This is one of the best books I ever read, I prefered it to his beautiful losers although that was lovely too. I am a big Cohenite and definately recomend practically anything he has ever done, this book for example is glorious.
Poetic and amazing... just like the writer! February 10, 2006
J. Schettling (Mcdonough, GA)
8 out of 8 found this review helpful
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.
This is the place to begin Cohen's prose work. June 6, 2005
J. N. Marks (Near. . . Manicougan)
14 out of 14 found this review helpful
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. But he is no fetishist, he does not need to drown in sensual pleasures. Life is sensual for him. Life is enduring and eternal and he needs no false Gods to redeem him from a fallen state or from desolation.
Five stars. At times this work is breathtaking.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 16
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