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Leonard Cohen: The Man Who Saw the Angels Fall

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Leonard Cohen: The Man Who Saw the Angels Fall

By: Christophe Lebold
Narrated by: Vlasta Vrana
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About this listen

Leonard Cohen has aimed high: to be all Jewish heroes at once. Like Jacob, he struggled with angels. Like David, he sang psalms and seduced women. But he never ceased doing what he did best: going from city to city and reviving our hearts. Leonard Cohen: The Man Who Saw the Angels Fall follows the singer’s cosmopolitan life from Montreal and New York to the Greek island of Hydra and examines his perpetual dialogues with himself, God, and avalanches.

We see how six decades of radiant pessimism and a few thousand nights in hotel rooms transformed a young Jewish poet who longed to be a saint into an existentialist troubadour in love with women and a gravelly voiced crooner who taught a thousand ways of dissolving into love.

After more than two decades of research and travels, Christophe Lebold, who befriended the poet and spent time with him in Los Angeles, delivers a stimulating analysis of Cohen’s life and art. Gracefully blending biography and essay, he interrogates the mission Cohen set out for himself: to show us that darkness is just the flip side of light.

©2024 Christophe Lebold (P)2024 Audible Inc. Editors Select Entertainment & Celebrities History & Criticism Heartfelt

Editorial Review

A deep look at a songwriting genius
Leonard Cohen always defied easy categorization. A writer who penned two novels before becoming famous as a singer-songwriter, he was a crooner who loved a well-cut suit, a poet who lived in austerity, and a Sabbath-observing Jew who practiced Zen Buddhism. Reveling in seduction as much as solitude, his work was both voluptuous and spare, metaphysical and sensual. Christophe Lebold’s biography does more than embrace these seeming contradictions; the contradictions, in fact, are the point. We all contain multitudes, and Cohen’s writing, Lebold tells us, “restores us to the full weight of our lives.” First published in French in 2013, this deep philosophical analysis of Cohen’s six-decade career is finally being released in English and in audio for the first time. As Cohen said upon the book’s release three years before his death, “I am deeply respectful of the mind that has produced this book.”— Phoebe N., Audible Editor

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