HYDRA AND THE BANANAS OF LEONARD COHEN: A Midlife Crisis in the Sun

A British poet turns 53, moves to a Greek island, becomes obsessed with the island's most famous ex-resident—singer/songwriter Leonard Cohen—and writes a book about it all. It's an eclectic mixture of memoir, diary, scrapbook and philosophical ramblings. Green, the poet, finds himself living next door to a garden full of banana trees owned by 1970s pop star Cohen (referred to only by the initial "L."). Inexplicably, Green becomes powerfully attracted to the bananas and their absent owner. He begins to see bananas everywhere: in the Old Testament (did Adam and Eve clothe themselves in banana leaves?), in Robbe-Grillet poems, on the cover of L.'s album I'm Your Man. He even goes so far as to befriend some of L.'s old acquaintances on the island, including a fellow poet and L.'s former lover, Suzanne, who is, alas, not the Suzanne of the famous L. song. The goal of all this good-natured stalking is unclear, but this isn't a book of goals, or even conclusions; it's simply an expression of what is, clearly, an enviable and rewarding existence. Green's idiosyncrasies occasionally annoy—as when he starts a new paragraph with the sentence, "I think I'll start a new paragraph"—but just as often he produces little treasures, such as a raunchy 1950s rumba celebrating "Chiquita Banana, down in Martinique," who "dresses in bananas with the modern technique." (Sept.)

Forecast:Green's many-headed book should appeal to fans of Trout Fishing in America, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and other whimsical literature.