Leonard Cohen, Untold Stories: From This Broken Hill, Volume 2

★★★★ Michael Posner

Second instalment of oral history hits singer’s squeezed middle years.

“I wish I could just say everything in one word,” Leonard Cohen once said. “I hate all the things that can happen between the beginning of a sentence and the end.” He probably wouldn’t have appreciated Michael Posner’s second biographical document, then, a tumble of vivid gossip and unreliable memories from friends and lovers. Covering 1971 to 1988, the narrative is marked by Cohen’s turbulent relationship with Suzanne Elrod, domesticity and fatherhood, his interest in Buddhism, and an almost monotonous stream of adoring young women. There is creative tumult – Columbia’s rejection of Various Positions, Phil Spector’s Death

Of A Ladies’ Man gunplay – but the eyewitness approach also leads to brilliant bathos, such as Cohen’s fury at a parking ticket, or a summit with Bob Dylan: “they had absolutely nothing to say to each other.” From This Broken Hill entertainingly builds Cohen’s world around him, finding a man struggling through the middle of his life’s sentence. Victoria Segal