The History of Them All: Chapter 1-9 Summary

Beautiful Losers by Leonard Cohen is a stream-of-consciousness story of an unnamed folklorist living in a psycho-sexual hell. Having lost his wife and male lover, he turns to the history of an Iroquois saint for his salvation. The novel is a depiction of spiritual yearning in the orgiastic humanistic days of the mid-sixties.

In Chapter 1 the narrator addresses the blessed Iroquois woman Catherine Tekakwitha. She died in the late seventeenth century, and now the narrator longs to be with her. He remembers his deceased friend and lover, F., who died in an asylum from syphilis. Now, our narrator is suffering from depression and crippling constipation.

In Chapter 2 our narrator introduces himself. He is a folklorist and scholar of the Canadian A——- tribe, a pitiful tribe that has been...