A grim fable ... While the novel is stirring in its almost mythological simplicity, compelling in its portrait of deranged rapture, intelligently attuned to the seductions and self-delusions of false transcendence, it is also structurally clumsy, hindered by a climactic twist and mechanically staged stock characters ... These same flaws afflict...the short fiction collected in A Ballet of Lepers. But unlike the early novel, many of these stories are built around striking images of frailty and desire ... In his lyrics, Cohen took the melodrama and solipsism that plagued his prose and alchemized them into something more moving and mysterious. Once he turned to songwriting, Cohen set fiction aside. Perhaps it was a purely strategic decision, or maybe he ultimately understood that it was not his form. If the pieces gathered in A Ballet of Lepers testify to this, they nonetheless offer nascent glimmers of his inimitable artistic vision: intimate yet aloof, trembling with weakness even as it aches toward wisdom.

A Ballet of Lepers is so rancid—flagrantly, deliberately—it almost seemed like an experiment in how dark his muse could take him ... A Ballet of Lepers was too degenerate for its time, but it’s hard to imagine it surfacing now ... Mixing the sacred and the profane and everything in between, [Cohen] became our John Donne ... He hadn’t gotten there yet in A Ballet of Lepers, but the integrity of the language is solid throughout.

The title piece...justifies the decision to bring these things to light and not only for the insights it offers into the artist that Cohen was to become. The novella is a strange confessional ... As ever in Cohen’s work, that inherited sense of anxiety and tragedy and religious weight of feeling...comes to be set against a dark wit and the intoxicating, troubling freedoms of the coming sexual revolution ... A curious and compulsive examination of the boundaries of honesty and cruelty.

Ranging from an unvarnished journal entry to an intergalactic Twilight Zone episode, they come across as an endearingly ragtag bunch of tryouts. For the Cohen obsessive, there are fascinating glimpses into his self-fashioning. On almost every page, you can find an image that later blossomed in one of his songs ... Twisty but deeply affecting ... At its worst, A Ballet of Lepers is bitter and portentous ... n a Cohen song, we would tolerate and perhaps even enjoy this, because there would be a killer tune, and the voice delivering the beating would sound like that of a world expert on compassion. Stripped of the troubadour’s glamour, it appears – as Cohen clearly intended – far more ugly than the hapless Cagely. But it’s the taint of bitterness that is most offputting.

A Ballet of Lepers isn’t particularly revelatory; nor is it simply an exercise in looting the archives. It is a relatively strong collection of fiction. Uneven in places, and undeniably young (from an artist who always seemed prematurely aged and sagacious), it’s definitely worth reading ... A Ballet of Lepers, the novella, is the most substantial work in the volume, an existential exploration of violence and beauty, love and cruelty, obsession and renunciation. The piece itself is spare and taut ... The novella carries a flair which, even in a work this early, is recognizably Cohen’s own ... In the end, A Ballet of Lepers is a valuable, if relatively minor, addition to the Cohen canon, the traces of a writer in his twenties not discovering his voice so much as affirming it, and in the process creating a blueprint for the decades of work to follow.

The already mature persona of Cohen’s early songs suggests a youth of burning intensity, wandering by moonlight amid gothic architecture, contemplating the spilled blood of his ancestors, touching perfect bodies with his mind, and so forth. On that score A Ballet of Lepers offers ample confirmation ... There is much existential brooding, which yields Cohen’s best writing. The action is somewhat less scintillating ... Overall the novel leaves the impression of a young man imagining his way into the rages of older men he doesn’t yet fathom ... There are moments of bracing sexual frankness, a few indelible images of savagery, and spare doses of potent humour.

... not light reading. In fact, it’s so physically and emotionally brutal that after finishing it, I had to put my copy away for a week. But it’s also an astonishingly deft and confident work of juvenilia that prefigures the themes that would propel Cohen to fame and preoccupy him throughout his life: passion and violence, sacredness and shame ... One of Cohen’s earliest works, the novel is raw and forceful in describing the slippery nature of desire. Few people go around breaking windows at will, but most have confronted impulses that contravene social norms or, worse, personal principle ... does stumble in its chauvinistic attitude towards its female characters ... Unburdened by their own motivations or desires and content to help the narrator through his existential crisis, all three read more like plot devices than fully realized characters. The narrator and the old man inflict extraordinary violence on all three, and because of Cohen’s lack of attention to them, it’s hard to excuse that as gritty storytelling or philosophical allegory. To a charitable reader, these three characters might testify to a kind of callousness common in young writers. To an uncharitable one, they demonstrate a fascination with the abuse of women ... Cohen’s narrator learns the bitter consequences of cruelty, but he never learns to see women as anything other than vehicles for his own self-expression.

Condensed forms better suit the writer ... Cohen explores perspectives, voice and style by writing about love and loss. They are humorous, tragic and occasionally cut short from revealing what they are about ... He may have been punching above his weight when he wrote these stories, but the exploration of art created during Cohen’s formative years will please fans.

The Leonard Cohen we know from his songs is here, too, in his precocious way of telling a story (especially the ones that touch on physical frailty and the indignity of aging), and, overall, in the intoxicating way his words flow across the page. Cohen was a wordsmith of the first order.

An enthralling collection of work written in the 1950s and ’60s, as complex and dark as his lyrics ... Cohen writes brilliantly of desire and cruelty as his desperate characters yearn for connection. This is magnificent.