A previously unpublished novel by Leonard Cohen is due for publication this autumn.
Written in Montreal in 1956 – the year Cohen published his first poetry collection – A Ballet of Lepers focuses on “toxic relationships and the lengths one will go to maintain them”, according to a press release.
As detailed in the Cohen biography Various Positions by Ira B Nadel, the 91-page book “tells the story of a 35-year-old sales clerk who takes in his elderly grandfather” to live together in a cramped boarding house … The grandfather is given to fits of violence, and the narrator (who remains unnamed) finds an awakening violence within himself.”
It opens with the lines: “My grandfather came to live with me. There was nowhere else for him to go. What had happened to all his children? Death, decay, exile – I hardly know.”
The novel demonstrated “a growing sense of Jewish history and tragedy”, wrote Nadel, a theme that would develop in Cohen’s subsequent poetry, and reflected the “difficulties that Cohen faced with his own senile grandfather, although without the degree of violence”.
The book was originally rejected by two publishers. Cohen, who died in 2016, once said that A Ballet of Lepers was “probably a better novel” than his celebrated first novel, The Favourite Game, published in 1963.
The new publication of the novel will be accompanied by 15 short stories and the script for a radio play from Cohen’s archives, all written between 1956 and 1961, and titled A Ballet of Lepers: A Novel and Stories.
The works explore themes “from shame and unworthiness to sexual desire in all its sacred and profane dimensions to longing, whether for love, family, freedom, or transcendence”, and “probe the inner demons of his characters, many of whom could function as stand-ins for the author himself.”
The collection was assembled by Cohen scholar Alexandra Pleshoyano, who has written an afterword.
Robert Kory, trustee of the Leonard Cohen family trust, said: “Leonard said before his death that his life’s true masterwork was his archive, which he kept meticulously for the benefit of fans and scholars one day to discover. I’m pleased that, with this book, his readers and listeners can begin that rich journey.”
Canongate will publish A Ballet of Lepers: A Novel and Stories in the UK on 11 October 2022.
