Beautiful Losers: Time Period and Socio-Economic Realisation

Beautiful Losers is a  novel that was published in the year 1966 which, today, is over 54 years ago. A lot of things happened in the sixties: a lot of women started building a place for themselves in their society. Even if they still had to do the things that were considered to be "women tasks" ( Cleansing up, making dinner, taking care of the children), they still manage to rank higher in the social status.  The sixties were a moment of transformation and innovation for little Canada, especially for the city of Montréal who hosted the  World Expo '67. Montréal was now on the map. The metropole welcomed millions of visitors and with visitors came innovation: the underground metro, or the "Quiet Revolution". This helped to put some distance between religion and politics. The churches lost their power over Canadians and science took over. The middle class, who we assume the main characters are from, became richer and got a better quality of life. We can see that the main character and his friends are able to afford inessential things such as nail polish for a reproduction of the acropolis made in plaster. We also noticed that the main character, whose name is not revealed, is quite educated. He was able to receive a proper education. 

    As for the setting of the story, there is no actual statement of a date in the book, however, it is revealed that the location in which the book takes place is the city of Montréal, Québec. The author leaves us completely blind to the aspect of time and confuses us by shifting from past to present. He uses flashbacks to throw us off completely of what is now and what is in the past. In other works of fiction, when the author doesn't give us a date, we assume the story takes place in the current time. That is why we assumed Beautiful Losers takes place in the sixties. We confirmed our assumption, thanks to some clues splintered in the novel: the fact that elevators were used in the book or that food delivery is accessible for our characters (chapter five). The characters also state that they were able to watch Hollywood movies, but this industry only emerged in the sixties in Québec. This confirms our previous assumption: the novel took place not so long ago, precisely in the sixties.

    An important aspect of the novel would be the story of the first nations. Leonard Cohen acknowledges Canada's flaws and exposes how the first nations were treated. How foreigners stole the land of the natives and proceeded to convert their people to a more common lifestyle and how they were treated as savages and not as humans being.

     As we said in the previous blog post, Cohen was in Greece for a short period of time.  When he came back to Québec, he learned about the thought of separating the country. This political agitation inspired some themes in Beautiful Losers. Themes like religion and mysticism were approach in this text. In conclusion, this book was written in a period of time in which a lot of events happened and those events may have inspired Cohen during his writing of the novel.