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Last Seen
Last Seen, Matt Cohen’s penultimate novel, was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award and the Trillium Book Award. Last Seen is a darkly comic story of two brothers and a woman who brings them both back to life. Harold, the older brother, is handsome and charming but dying of cancer. Alex is bookish and a scholar in Europe. With Francine, a nurse they both once loved, Alec cares for Harold until he dies. One day, Alec goes into a bar full of Elvis impersonators and there meets Francine—and Harold. Why has Harold come back from the dead? In this fragmentary tale of obsessive grieving, Cohen mixes moments of wry humour with touching pathos. Last Seen demonstrates that it takes more than death to untie the knot between two brothers.
From the eBook edition.
From the eBook edition.
224 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1996
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41 people want to read
About the author
Matt Cohen
89 books10 followersMatt Cohen studied political economy at the University of Toronto, and taught political philosophy and religion at McMaster University in the late 1960s before publishing his first novel, Korsoniloff, in 1969.
His greatest popular success as a writer was his final novel, Elizabeth and After, which won the 1999 Governor General's Award for English-language Fiction only a few weeks before his death. He had been nominated twice previously, but had not won, in 1979 for The Sweet Second Summer of Kitty Malone and in 1997 for Last Seen.
A founding member of the Writers' Union of Canada, he served on the executive board for many years and as president in 1986. During his presidency the Writer's Union was finally able to persuade the government of Canada to form a commission and establish a Public Lending Right program. He also served on the Toronto Arts Council as chair of the Literary Division and was able to obtain increased funding for writers. In recognition of this work he was awarded a Toronto Arts Award and the Harbourfront Prize.
Cohen died after a battle with lung cancer. A Canadian literary award, the Matt Cohen Prize - In Celebration of a Writing Life, is presented in Cohen's memory by the Writer's Trust of Canada.
He also published a number of children's books under the pseudonym Teddy Jam. Cohen's authorship of the Teddy Jam books was not revealed until after his death. The Fishing Summer was also nominated for a Governor General's Award for children's literature in 1997, making Cohen one of the few writers ever to be nominated for Governor General's Awards in two different categories in the same year.
A film adaptation of his 1990 novel Emotional Arithmetic has been produced by Triptych films starring Max von Sydow, Christopher Plummer, Gabriel Byrne and Susan Sarandon. It was the closing Gala at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2007.
His greatest popular success as a writer was his final novel, Elizabeth and After, which won the 1999 Governor General's Award for English-language Fiction only a few weeks before his death. He had been nominated twice previously, but had not won, in 1979 for The Sweet Second Summer of Kitty Malone and in 1997 for Last Seen.
A founding member of the Writers' Union of Canada, he served on the executive board for many years and as president in 1986. During his presidency the Writer's Union was finally able to persuade the government of Canada to form a commission and establish a Public Lending Right program. He also served on the Toronto Arts Council as chair of the Literary Division and was able to obtain increased funding for writers. In recognition of this work he was awarded a Toronto Arts Award and the Harbourfront Prize.
Cohen died after a battle with lung cancer. A Canadian literary award, the Matt Cohen Prize - In Celebration of a Writing Life, is presented in Cohen's memory by the Writer's Trust of Canada.
He also published a number of children's books under the pseudonym Teddy Jam. Cohen's authorship of the Teddy Jam books was not revealed until after his death. The Fishing Summer was also nominated for a Governor General's Award for children's literature in 1997, making Cohen one of the few writers ever to be nominated for Governor General's Awards in two different categories in the same year.
A film adaptation of his 1990 novel Emotional Arithmetic has been produced by Triptych films starring Max von Sydow, Christopher Plummer, Gabriel Byrne and Susan Sarandon. It was the closing Gala at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2007.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
March 23, 2013
Last Seen, the story of brothers Alec and Harold, is the best evocation of grief and grieving I’ve ever read. It’s tragic and human, even funny, and it deals with universals –what’s more common than death? Yet it doesn’t lay out grand themes to do its work. Its accomplishments don’t lean on clichés about spiritual meaningfulness or on hokey sentimentalism. This book is very specific. And it’s poetry! Beautifully written. Its significance throughout is embedded deeply into its characters, events, words and pages. And this, I think, is why I have ended up writing about it in a way that seems almost like a cataloguing of story details. I hope this is more than a clumsy précis of Last Seen, but if that’s all I’ve been able to write, it’s probably because Matt Cohen is such a good writer (and I’m not), and I’m unable to encapsulate or unravel his artful/artless telling.
Alec, the primary narrator, once planned to achieve greatness at the feet of his thesis advisor, the renowned philosopher and author of White Men Dying, Herr Meyser. But he now teaches at a university in Toronto, is known as a “journalist,” and his dreams of intellectual cachet and critical acclaim have won him little more than a makeshift office that’s actually his laundry room, and a book commission he doubts he can fulfill (to produce a downer of a work – on the death of European culture). “Herr Meyser” is now just the name Alec gave to a hat he bought for himself but then presented to Harold when it proved to be too large.
Harold, a dashing, debonair man-about town, is Alec’s younger brother. He’s the kind of guy who attends family parties armed with a kit that includes a bottle of grappa and magic tricks for the kids. He’s a charmer, perhaps a trickster, whom few can resist. Certainly Alec is drawn to him, again and again, even though it doesn’t always work out as Alec would like. Harold’s an advertising man, and he’s “in the coin,” i.e., rich. Somehow you get the feeling that the product Harold sells most successfully, with the most dazzling panache, is himself.
Francine is introduced to us, and to Alec (by Harold), in a scene that Alec, narrating, identifies as the moment this story really begins: in the parking lot of a liquor store, on the day of their father’s funeral. Francine is a fun girl, and a nurse by profession. She seems to be Harold’s some-time girlfriend, but also functions as a kind of spirit guide. In Harold’s final days, as his caregiver, she eases his pain and his journey toward the end.
For Alec, Harold represents what he himself might have been, if academia, self-doubt, and regret had not been his lot. And while Alec wants to still play the role of big brother, he also resents the sleight of hand with which Harold apparently achieves his worldly ease and the dismissive way that he quickly loses interest in Alec’s endeavors and the things Alec holds dear. On the other hand, Alec’s pessimistic bumbling and intellectual airs irritate and sometimes insult Harold, who believes that Alec is the smart one and the darling of their parents. Yet the two are essential to each other. When Harold is in the final stages of cancer, his agony is more than either brother can bear. And when Harold is first diagnosed with cancer, Alec’s first reaction is to vehemently forbid him to die: Harold’s dying is unthinkable.
And that’s the gist of this story. Death is unthinkable, impossible. Harold and Alec are the ground of what’s real for each other; Like the siblings of any given family, they alone share the unique, even if not unusual, culture of their childhoods, the assumptions upon which all else, finally, is built. If Harold can be not-there, then rationality is similarly at risk; Nothing is reliable – neither the difference between life and death, nor self and other, nor past and present. When Harold dies, Alec and the story ricochet through time from memories to vague projections of a future that his children might inhabit, to a foggy present where his domestic life, his work, and his life in general are a fiasco. Even Harold, it seems, sometimes stumbles around the streets of Toronto, having not quite figured out he’s dead. And Alec, in a mist of tears and Scotch, finds himself in a mirage-like club devoted to celebrating not only The King of posthumous appearances, but also appearances of the disappeared. Here he runs into Harold and Francine. Harold is even harder to pin down in death than he was when he was alive, but he seems to be the same old Harold. They go to a beach; Harold and Francine disappear. Reappearance, disappearance. Slowly, as Alec’s world seems to crumble, Alec and Harold negotiate with death, after death.
If there is any sense of future here, it lies with the next generation. But it won’t be Francine’s baby, who might have been Harold’s. Or Alec’s. But who will never be anything, will never emerge from any underworld into the light of day. Only Alec’s kids, Simon and Emily, seem to bob to the surface of the muck that the adults around them are mired in. “Only they,” Alec says “were uncorrupted by the sudden ugliness death had splashed over the rest of us.”
The story of Harold and Alec, and the story of Alec’s mourning are specific, as I’ve said. Alec wonders how he can write about cultural theories that talk about the possible demise of mankind when all he really cares about is the loss of this one particular human being. Aren’t the painful, niggling details of a single life just boring trivialities compared with the grand sweep of history? But the details in this story are important and necessary. Without the mess and the pain and confusion, you’d have nothing. Even the order of things hardly matters, because, by the end, it’s all there, and simultaneously, not there. And if anyone can take a lesson away from all of this, perhaps it’s only the Herr Meysers of this world. For the rest of us – for anyone who’s ever lost someone they love, as we all have, the collecting and mulling over every single moment, every look, every what-if and if-only, the regretting and denying and maybe, eventually, accepting, is the work of mourning, the way we do it. As Emily protests when Alec tries to excuse himself for having told her and Simon an unusually truncated bedtime story by saying he was leaving out the boring parts, “there are no boring parts! … If you don’t tell the whole thing, you wreck it.”
Alec, the primary narrator, once planned to achieve greatness at the feet of his thesis advisor, the renowned philosopher and author of White Men Dying, Herr Meyser. But he now teaches at a university in Toronto, is known as a “journalist,” and his dreams of intellectual cachet and critical acclaim have won him little more than a makeshift office that’s actually his laundry room, and a book commission he doubts he can fulfill (to produce a downer of a work – on the death of European culture). “Herr Meyser” is now just the name Alec gave to a hat he bought for himself but then presented to Harold when it proved to be too large.
Harold, a dashing, debonair man-about town, is Alec’s younger brother. He’s the kind of guy who attends family parties armed with a kit that includes a bottle of grappa and magic tricks for the kids. He’s a charmer, perhaps a trickster, whom few can resist. Certainly Alec is drawn to him, again and again, even though it doesn’t always work out as Alec would like. Harold’s an advertising man, and he’s “in the coin,” i.e., rich. Somehow you get the feeling that the product Harold sells most successfully, with the most dazzling panache, is himself.
Francine is introduced to us, and to Alec (by Harold), in a scene that Alec, narrating, identifies as the moment this story really begins: in the parking lot of a liquor store, on the day of their father’s funeral. Francine is a fun girl, and a nurse by profession. She seems to be Harold’s some-time girlfriend, but also functions as a kind of spirit guide. In Harold’s final days, as his caregiver, she eases his pain and his journey toward the end.
For Alec, Harold represents what he himself might have been, if academia, self-doubt, and regret had not been his lot. And while Alec wants to still play the role of big brother, he also resents the sleight of hand with which Harold apparently achieves his worldly ease and the dismissive way that he quickly loses interest in Alec’s endeavors and the things Alec holds dear. On the other hand, Alec’s pessimistic bumbling and intellectual airs irritate and sometimes insult Harold, who believes that Alec is the smart one and the darling of their parents. Yet the two are essential to each other. When Harold is in the final stages of cancer, his agony is more than either brother can bear. And when Harold is first diagnosed with cancer, Alec’s first reaction is to vehemently forbid him to die: Harold’s dying is unthinkable.
And that’s the gist of this story. Death is unthinkable, impossible. Harold and Alec are the ground of what’s real for each other; Like the siblings of any given family, they alone share the unique, even if not unusual, culture of their childhoods, the assumptions upon which all else, finally, is built. If Harold can be not-there, then rationality is similarly at risk; Nothing is reliable – neither the difference between life and death, nor self and other, nor past and present. When Harold dies, Alec and the story ricochet through time from memories to vague projections of a future that his children might inhabit, to a foggy present where his domestic life, his work, and his life in general are a fiasco. Even Harold, it seems, sometimes stumbles around the streets of Toronto, having not quite figured out he’s dead. And Alec, in a mist of tears and Scotch, finds himself in a mirage-like club devoted to celebrating not only The King of posthumous appearances, but also appearances of the disappeared. Here he runs into Harold and Francine. Harold is even harder to pin down in death than he was when he was alive, but he seems to be the same old Harold. They go to a beach; Harold and Francine disappear. Reappearance, disappearance. Slowly, as Alec’s world seems to crumble, Alec and Harold negotiate with death, after death.
If there is any sense of future here, it lies with the next generation. But it won’t be Francine’s baby, who might have been Harold’s. Or Alec’s. But who will never be anything, will never emerge from any underworld into the light of day. Only Alec’s kids, Simon and Emily, seem to bob to the surface of the muck that the adults around them are mired in. “Only they,” Alec says “were uncorrupted by the sudden ugliness death had splashed over the rest of us.”
The story of Harold and Alec, and the story of Alec’s mourning are specific, as I’ve said. Alec wonders how he can write about cultural theories that talk about the possible demise of mankind when all he really cares about is the loss of this one particular human being. Aren’t the painful, niggling details of a single life just boring trivialities compared with the grand sweep of history? But the details in this story are important and necessary. Without the mess and the pain and confusion, you’d have nothing. Even the order of things hardly matters, because, by the end, it’s all there, and simultaneously, not there. And if anyone can take a lesson away from all of this, perhaps it’s only the Herr Meysers of this world. For the rest of us – for anyone who’s ever lost someone they love, as we all have, the collecting and mulling over every single moment, every look, every what-if and if-only, the regretting and denying and maybe, eventually, accepting, is the work of mourning, the way we do it. As Emily protests when Alec tries to excuse himself for having told her and Simon an unusually truncated bedtime story by saying he was leaving out the boring parts, “there are no boring parts! … If you don’t tell the whole thing, you wreck it.”
May 1, 2018
Margaret Atwood chose this as he best book of 1996 for Macleans's magazine. I agree with her it is an exceptional novel. She wrote that it was Matt Cohen's best novel up to that date. I would put it on a par with his early novel "The Disinherited" but agree with her that in that regard,.
As in his previous novel "The Bookseller", Cohen uses the relationship between two brothers as teh foundation for this novel. Cohen again explores the nature of relationships in this novel. It is a novel about the choices one makes in life and how these choices will inevitably affect those around one. Alec Constantine is devastated by the death of his younger brother Harold. He is not only devastated by the fact of Harold's death but by the extended agony of Harold's death by cancer. Alec enters a depression and within that depression comes to the understanding that he has made choices in his life and has choices to make. That though he is wrapped in a relationship of family and responsibilities to those family members, he is alone and must make decisions about the rest of his life. There is a recurring reference in the novel to Faust and the bargain to be made. Like Faust, Alec must make a choice and live with teh consequences
As in his previous novel "The Bookseller", Cohen uses the relationship between two brothers as teh foundation for this novel. Cohen again explores the nature of relationships in this novel. It is a novel about the choices one makes in life and how these choices will inevitably affect those around one. Alec Constantine is devastated by the death of his younger brother Harold. He is not only devastated by the fact of Harold's death but by the extended agony of Harold's death by cancer. Alec enters a depression and within that depression comes to the understanding that he has made choices in his life and has choices to make. That though he is wrapped in a relationship of family and responsibilities to those family members, he is alone and must make decisions about the rest of his life. There is a recurring reference in the novel to Faust and the bargain to be made. Like Faust, Alec must make a choice and live with teh consequences
January 6, 2021
It's a beautifully written book that just flies by...but I'll be damned if I could figure out what was going on. There are two brothers, a women between them...and a resurrection at an Elvis Club? The sweet characters and the dry wit kept me going...but in the end, it feels like I experienced something lovely...if only someone could it explain it to me.
January 19, 2021
A lovely surprise. I chose it only because it was by a Canadian author, without even reading the dust jacket, so when the book turned out to be a quirky story about a young man who keeps “seeing” his dead brother in strange places, I was pretty happy.
April 3, 2025
This book has an interesting lyrical style. The unlikeability of the protagonist seemed to keep me from either enjoying it or finding it particularly enriching. A theme seemed to be that self-absorbed alcoholics tend to be miserable.
December 31, 2008
Though the book cover raved quotes of amazing approval, I personally did not find the novel too gripping.
The story is about two brothers, Alec and Harold, and follows Alec's coping with Harold's death to cancer. It is emotional, sentimental and even witty at times but, personally, I found the book hopped back from one topic to another too often, making it - at times - difficult to follow the story. Every situation seemed to flashback to another and then yet again to another. Confusing.
The story is about two brothers, Alec and Harold, and follows Alec's coping with Harold's death to cancer. It is emotional, sentimental and even witty at times but, personally, I found the book hopped back from one topic to another too often, making it - at times - difficult to follow the story. Every situation seemed to flashback to another and then yet again to another. Confusing.
July 31, 2011
Great book, really makes the reader feel what it's like to die from cancer and coping with the loss from the point of view of the one who suffers from it and from the family members who have to learn to live without them.
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December 14, 2007French editor: Daniel Arsand
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews