proceeds to tell the narrator about the death of Catherine Tekakwitha and her subsequent miracles. describes a night he spent with Edith where they nearly achieved their full-body orgasms and were baptized with a special soap. He has been training him with his sexual-emotional tests. He tells him that both he and Edith decided that the narrator was the only one who could attain spiritual grace. now imprisoned in a mental asylum after the bombing - writes the narrator to explain his methods. told him about his plan to blow up a statue of Queen Victoria during Elizabeth II's visit to Canada. He learns about Catherine Tekakwitha's chastity and her renunciation of her Iroquois beliefs. The narrator meanwhile, finally leaves his disgusting apartment and goes to F.'s tree-house, one of many assets bequeathed after his friend's death. Before she died, Edith roped him into experimenting with holy items, and the two of them grow obsessed with total orgasms. is entering the late stages of syphilis, however, and is going mad.

fakes a car-crash to scare him and drags him into the Free Quebec movement, for which F. who is a libertine, Member of Parliament, and general bully - proceeds to put the narrator through a series of tests, mostly sexual, forcing him to admit his desire for power and spiritual contentment. Now, the narrator masturbates frequently, suffers crippling constipation and no longer bathes, refusing to leave his apartment in Montreal.Īfter Edith's death, F. He had a sexual affair with both, but only after Edith's suicide did he learn that she and F. He has lost the two people he loves: his wife Edith and his childhood friend F. In the first book, The History of Them All, the nameless narrator researches Catherine Tekakwitha, a nearly-sainted Iroquois from the seventeen century. The novel is a depiction of spiritual yearning in the orgiastic humanistic days of the mid-sixties. Having lost his wife and male lover, he turns to the history of an Iroquois saint for his salvation. Beautiful Losers by Leonard Cohen is a stream-of-consciousness story of an unnamed folklorist living in a psycho-sexual hell.

Beautiful losers cohen