Do we really need another biography of Leonard Cohen? A cursory look reveals that almost 30 such books already exist on the late, great, gravel-voiced boulevardier. They range from the authoritative — Sylvie Simmons’s, I’m Your Man — to those with a significantly Jewish twist, such as Matti Friedman’s peerless glimpse of Cohen in the Sinai during the Yom Kippur War, Who By Fire, or Harry Freedman’s enjoyable The Mystical Roots of Genius.
At least Christophe Lebold, a professor of literature and rock culture at the University of Strasbourg, has the grace to recognise that his own contribution is perhaps superfluous, telling us on the flyleaf of his mammoth new biography: “The first edition of my book was published in French in late 2014 to good reviews and few readers”.
Certainly one can’t help but wonder what prompted his publishers to decide that what the world was lacking was yet another book about Leonard Cohen.
Nearly 450 pages later I am not much wiser. Lebold assumes a knowledge of Cohen’s life on the part of the general reader as a springboard for many and varied musings on his Judaism, his early start in Montreal, the period he spent on the Greek island of Hydra, the drugs, the womanising, the six years he spent up a mountain studying Buddhism, and so forth. Those familiar with Cohen will know these building blocks already, those less so might be bewildered.
