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 Book of Longing
Leonard Cohen
(Penguin)
By turns haunting, darkly humorous and playful, Book of Longing marks Leonard Cohen’s long overdue return to the printed page. Written over the course of more than twenty years in various locations, not least during his extended retreat at a Zen Buddhist monastery in California, the book collates ruminations on ageing and memory, simple life sketches and Cohen’s own drawings into an oddly moving whole. While hardly free of melancholy (‘The Darkness Enters’ is particularly affecting), Book of Longing effectively continues the work of his last studio album, Dear Heather, in correcting a long-running and frankly ridiculous misconception of Cohen as the unsmiling prince of misery. A bone-dry wit has always been integral to his work, and it’s in plentiful supply here, whether it be applied to the deficiencies of his mountain-top retreat in ‘The Lovesick Monk’ (“It’s dismal here/The only thing I don’t need is a comb”) or myths about his own past in ‘Titles’
(“My reputation as a Ladies’ Man was a joke/It caused me to laugh bitterly through the ten thousand nights I spent alone”). Dense with acute observations and vivid flashes of imagery, Book of Longing is a wry, wise addition to a formidable body of work.
David Davies
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 Trout Mask Replica
Kevin Courier
(continuum)
Number 44 in the excellent 33 1/3 series of books by continuum, wherein writers wax lyrical about their favourite album, in this case the magnificently deranged Trout Mask Replica by Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band, truly one of the few albums one can say came from out of nowhere and, other than encouraging bug-eyed experi-mentalism in all manner of bands since, left little traceable mark on what followed. Courier expertly ties together all of the disparate threads that helped spawn this notoriously difficult album, from Howlin’ Wolf to Ornette Coleman via gospel, do-wop and some of the most demented lyrics ever committed to page (or not in some cases). It’s hard to imagine anyone but a Magic Band fan picking this up but even if you have yet to fathom the delights of Beefheart you will still find much to enjoy here, not least the discovery that the good Captian was in fact a despotic, less than benign dictator (and something of a musical
dunce), who hi-jacked the Magic Band and bullied them into recreating his muse, and it’s testament to the band that they were in fact able to actually play this mad noise and to Courier for making sense of it all for us.
Ruby Palmer
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