Customer Reviews

Leonard Cohen: Hallelujah: A New Biography

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I've been listening to a lot of Leonard Cohen music lately, I have at least one book of his poems on the shelves, and I know he's been around for a long time. But apart from that, I knew next to nothing about him. So, I read this book and while I'm dissatisfied with it, I came away knowing a little more.

Why the dissatisfaction? After all, there's lots of detail included about the lives and loves of Leonard Cohen, about his early years as a poet and author in Canada, his time in a Buddhist monastery, and information right up to 2009, the year he turned 75, when he went on tour. But this is Leonard Cohen at a distance: information gleaned from various sources and apparently from interviews with others who've known or worked with him. All this is fairly neatly worked into various themes: the role of religion, of sex, of drugs (and not to mention drugs and sex). There's mention, too, of complex interpersonal relationships, and of various (and often differing) answers that Leonard Cohen has given to different questions.

There's a lot of discussion about `Hallelujah', and of covers of Cohen songs that various people have made. There's some mention of his fiction and his poetry, and Tim Footman has kindly provided a list of his own personal top ten Leonard Cohen songs:

Tower of Song; Famous Blue Raincoat; Paper-Thin Hotel; Hallelujah; Bird on the Wire; Who By Fire; Anthem; A Thousand Kisses Deep; Suzanne; and The Great Event.

There is as well, quite a lot of commentary about how bad Tim Footman considers most of the cover art is on various releases. In fact, I think I learned more about some aspects of Tim Footman than I did about Leonard Cohen.

Still, I did like aspects of the book: there's information about other sources, a discography and a list of Leonard Cohen's published books.

Leonard Cohen, who turned 77 last month, is quoted as having once said: `I don't have much of a sense of my own work.' Perhaps not. But there are plenty of us who continue to enjoy it.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith