Named after a young Canadian poet in 1963, Leonard Cohen delivered the draft of The Favorite Game to its publisher, Jack McClelland. At first, the publisher declined, claiming he was overwhelmed by the typical narcissism of a first novel. Cohen later explained that this was his third novel, not his first, and that two previous works had gathered dust in a drawer. In fact, a year and a half had passed since the Famous Havana Diary, which chronicled a 1961 journey to Cuba to observe the impact of the Castro revolution, was left unfinished with only five pages surviving. The other work, Ballet for Lepers, was complete and, although Cohen felt it superior to The Favorite Play, it never reached publication until now.
Cohen halted fiction writing in 1966 after releasing The Beautiful Losers. Frustrated by its modest sales, the Canadian artist pursued a path as a folk singer-songwriter in the United States, recording his first LP, Songs of Leonard Cohen, in 1967 at the age of 33. The album’s success shaped his career. He became a respected figure worldwide as both author and performer of songs, releasing more than twenty albums and continuing to publish poetry collections, earning the Prince of Asturias Literary Award in 2011, before eventually abandoning the novel altogether.
insatiability after death
The death of a globally celebrated artist often unleashes a strong demand for unreleased works bearing his signature. Following Cohen’s passing in 2016, previously unreleased material began to surface. A poetry collection titled La lama appeared in 2018, and a year later the posthumous LP Thank You for Dance was issued. In Toronto, the Leonard Cohen archives are housed, and a manuscript containing A Ballet of Lepers, a little over a 100-page novel written when the author was only in his early twenties, was brought to light along with 15 stories and a radio play dated between 1956 and 1961.
The compiled material, gathering Cohen’s early writings, was released in October of the previous year and subsequently published in Spanish by Lumen and in Catalan by Empúries, with translations by Miguel Temprano and Míriam Cano.
In the closing pages, the editor notes that fragments from Cohen’s archive show attempts to publish these works on multiple occasions. Rejections are a common thread in a writer’s early career, yet they contrast with the later success of his first poetry books. The volume cites 1956’s Let’s Compare Mythologies and 1961’s The Spice Box of the Earth, illustrating how the early efforts fit into a timeline of acclaimed works and writings gathered in this latest collection.
The bright moments in A Ballet of Lepers do not merely showcase literary prowess; they offer glimpses into Cohen’s future instincts. The stories confront themes that would shape Canadian poetry and music—violence, desire, religion, loss, guilt, humiliation, and the drive for freedom. Yet within these pages, the youthful impulse to provoke and shock often competes with a more nuanced understanding of reality.
Images from his biography
The most intriguing thread is the novel that the collection is named after. A Ballet of Leprosy follows a middle-aged accountant who lives alone in a rented room, begins an affair with a woman who enjoys speaking sharp monologues in private, and shoulders the burden of caring for a grandfather whose brutal temper and erratic acts threaten everyone nearby. The hero becomes entangled in a cycle of acts of violence that place a frustrated luggage-room employee at the center of the chaos. The narrative bears echoes of Dostoevsky, whose influence was pivotal during those early years of learning.
Across both the novel and the short stories, Cohen mirrors moments from his own life: the death of his father, a close tie to his mother, the family Jewish heritage, the Eastern European grandfather, the Montreal setting, and the artistic ambitions challenged by a tough world. In these sections, he often writes in the present tense with a raw honesty, portraying a future self as a confident figure in a hat and raincoat wandering a wet boulevard at night with a certain compassion.
It took almost a decade for Cohen to set music to one of his poems, Suzanne Washes You, turning a distant fantasy into a remarkable reality. Yet one aspect of his legacy—the music—left the novel to linger in the background, shaping an enduring footprint in cultural history.