BOOKS
IT is appropriate that a French intellectual should find an untranslatable word to explain the late flowering of Leonard Cohen; that moment in the late 1980s when the self-styled “grocer of despair” perfected his blend of existential misery and comedy. The word is “doublure”. It means both the lining of a jacket and an actor’s body double. In The Man Who Saw The Angels Fall, Lebold suggests that Cohen’s ironic masks were doublures in both senses (or, as he doesn’t say, double doublures). The jacket seems to get lost in translation. The bit about actors lands somewhere between religion and a conjuring trick. “When the high priest pulls the concert towards excessive solemnity,” Lebold writes, “the joker steps in: when the prophet is through revealing the extent of the catastrophe, the crooner takes over and reminds us love still exists.”