Christophe Lebold, Leonard Cohen, The Man Who Saw the Angels Fall (2024)
Winner of the National Jewish Book Award 2024 (for “biography”)
• Toronto, ECW Press, 2024, 543 p. (Canadian & US version)
• Edinburg, Luath Press-ECW, 2024, 543 p. (UK version)
• Montreal, Boréal, 2024, 612 p. (French-Canadian version)
• Audiobooks in French and English by Audible
(Italian, Danish and Polish translations underway)
Back-cover :
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. Like Abraham, he moved from place to place and remained a stranger everywhere. But he never ceased doing what he did best: stepping into avalanches and reviving our hearts. From Montreal and New York to the Greek island of Hydra, Leonard Cohen, The Man Who Saw The Angels Fall follows the singer's cosmopolitan life and examines his perpetual dialogues with God, with himself and with hotel rooms.
After twenty years of research, Christophe Lebold, who spent time with the poet in Los Angeles, delivers a stimulating analysis of Cohen’s life and art . gracefully blending biography, and essay, he interrogates the mission the singer had set out for himself: to show us that darkness is just the other side of light.
The Author:
Christophe Lebold is associate professor at the University of Strasbourg (France), where he teaches literature, performance studies and rock culture.
A fan and friend of Leonard Cohen, he has travelled extensively on the poet’s tracks. Also a theatre actor and long-time student of Zen Buddhism, he likes poets and cats and – in case of good mood – all sentient beings.
