Almost six years after his death, Leonard Cohen has still not said his last word.
Posted at 11:00 a.m.
After the collection The Flame (2018) and the album Thanks for the Dance (2019), here it appears A Ballet of Lepersa short novel accompanied by short stories and a dramatic text which all date from before the publication of The Favorite Game (1963).
The novel A Ballet of Lepers (free translation: A Leper Ballet), which gives the book its title, is the piece de resistance. The short stories that follow are presented in chronological order established by Alexandra Pleshoyano, specialist in the work of the Montreal poet.
A Ballet of Lepers shows a man in his thirties who has to accommodate in the tiny room he occupies in Montreal a somewhat doddering grandfather whom he did not know was still alive. His arrival will not only shake up his daily life, it will also give him the impetus to give free rein to some of his most unhealthy desires: he will indeed seek revenge – or perhaps to transcend? – his feeling of emptiness by humiliating a stranger and mistreating his mistress.
There is in A Ballet of Lepers great violence, self-hatred projected onto others. A great loneliness too. This short novel already digs into themes that the poet and singer will polish all his life: rallying the sacred and the profane, the search for Salvation through sexuality, idealized love, the feeling of alienation, but also a quest for absolute.
The texts, also imbued with that irony inseparable from the way Leonard Cohen looked at things, were mostly written in Montreal from 1956 and some date from when he lived on the Greek island Hydra , on the Aegean Sea.
A Ballet of Lepers, A Novel and Stories
Leonard Cohen
McClelland & Stewart
272 pages