The Favorite Game: A Novel

Summary

In this unforgettable novel, Leonard Cohen boldly etches the youth and earlymanhood of Lawrence Breavman, only son of an old Jewish family in Montreal.

Life for Breavman is made up of dazzling color—a series of motion pictures fedthrough a high-speed projector: the half-understood death of his father; theadult games of love and war, with their infinite capacity for fantasy andcruelty; his secret experiments with hypnotism; the night-long adventures withKrantz, his beloved comrade and confidant. Later, achieving literary fame as acollege student, Breavman does penance through manual labor but ultimatelyflees to New York. And although he has loved the bodies of many women, it isonly when he meets Shell, whom he awakens to her own beauty, that he discoversthe totality of love and its demands and comes to terms with the sacrifices hemust make.