The Solitudes (The Aegypt Cycle) [Paperback]

John Crowley (Author)

Book Description

Series: The Aegypt Cycle | Publication Date: October 2, 2007

Reengaging the ideas of alternate lives, worlds, and worldviews that pulsed through his remarkable Little, Big, John Crowley's Ægypt series is a landmark in contemporary fiction. The series helped earn Crowley the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature, and Harold Bloom installed the first two books in the series in his 1993 Western canon. Now, following the Spring 2007 hardcover release of the final book in the series (Endless Things), Overlook is bringing the entire tetralogy back into print--and, for the first time, presenting it as a real series.

In The Solitudes, the opening of the series, we are introduced to Pierce Moffett, an unorthodox historian and an expert in ancient astrology, myths, and superstition. The land that Moffett studies is not the real, geographical Egypt but Ægypt, a country of the imagination. When Moffett discovers the historical novels of local writer Fellowes Kraft, his course is charted. Kraft's books interweave stories of Italian heretic Giordano Bruno, young Will Shakespeare, and Elizabethan occultist John Dee--stories that begin to mingle with the narrative of Moffett's real and dream life in 1970s America. As Moffett's journey in and out of his comfortable reality continues, what becomes clear is revelatory: there is more than one history of the world.

This is the dazzling first novel in a series that will certainly take its place amongst the great books of our time. Completely revised by the author to further the power of the series as a whole, this is a perfect chance to rediscover one of our truly great writers, and one of our truly magical stories.

Product Details

• Paperback: 432 pages
• Publisher: Overlook TP (October 2, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1585679860
• ISBN-13: 978-1585679867
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #711,797 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

John Crowley was born in the appropriately liminal town of Presque Isle, Maine, in 1942, his father then an officer in the US Army Air Corps. He grew up in Vermont, northeastern Kentucky and (for the longest stretch) Indiana, where he went to high school and college. He moved to New York City after college to make movies, and did find work in documentary films, an occupation he still pursues. He published his first novel (The Deep) in 1975, and his 14th volume of fiction (Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land) in 2005. Since 1993 he has taught creative writing at Yale University. In 1992 he received the Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He finds it more gratifying that almost all his work is still in print.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Aegypt Restored, October 23, 2007

By 

Crowley Fan - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Solitudes (The Aegypt Cycle) (Paperback)

This volume is absolutely wonderful. It is almost ridiculously fun, informative, exhilarating. Parts of it (I'm thinking especially of Pierce's flashbacks to life in New York, scattered across the first half) seem to me to be as good as--or even better than--anything in John Crowley's transcendent 1981 masterpiece, Little, Big.

The series centers on the Platonic/Gnostic notion that we're forgetting something, and that that something is our real life. It's not happening on another planet than this one: It flows through our own best, highest, most wakeful moments, and flows into the lives of others through incessant mystery. It's very easy to lose it again, to fall into routine or depression, to lose faith in ourselves and accept false external certainties, and this process is the heart of Aegypt's second and third volumes. But this first volume is one of discovery and rediscovery, of spring awakening, of following a trail of bread crumbs up the sky.

Bless Crowley for writing this book, the happy start of the ultimate romance for intelligent people.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Worth the wait, February 11, 2008

By 

Dangle's girl (Astoria, NY United States) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Solitudes (The Aegypt Cycle) (Paperback)

Very few modern authors can both engage your intellect and stir your soul; even fewer can unleash your imagination. But perhaps only one writer alive today can do all that in prose that is truly awe-inspiring: John Crowley. I'd been waiting for years for Aegypt to be reissued--it says something that used copies of the first editions were going for hundreds of dollars. Finally I got my copy of Solitudes and marveled at Crowley's ability to cast a spell in only a few pages. This book takes concentration and commitment to fully appreciate, you'll also probably want to check on some other sources on topics like Hermes Trismegistus and John Dee (thank god for Wikipedia). The 1970s setting is also a bit unfortunate, as it's recent enough to carry some baggage but not recent enough for this Gen X reader to really relate to. But this book will move and transport you like nothing else out there. Find a quiet place and give it a chance.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Crowley is an alchemist, January 7, 2009

By 

R. Knisely (Boston, MA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Solitudes (The Aegypt Cycle) (Paperback)

It seems John Crowely's true work will always be largely a secret kept by the extremely passionate and relatively few readers who are his very devoted fans. Crowley insists that you climb outside the neatly kept vehicle of your world view and take a look at the scenery you can't see from inside.

As was made clear in one such reader's comment, the original title, "Aegypt", was forced on the write by the publisher, as was the ridiculous decision to take a single (if lengthy) novel and split it into four separate books, each of which was marketed without reference to the fact that it is the continuation of a single story! "The Solitudes" was Crowley's original name for this first section of his awesome tale of alternate possibilities and love in a time of Idiocy. Which is the cue for saying the person who thought this book is "the most poorly written, pathetic attempt at a story that I've come across in years" probably wouldn't know great writing if it front ended her on an expressway. Crowley is an alchemist with words and his vocabulary is rather larger than your typical pulp romance writer, which may have been the issue with that reader. In "Little, Big" he demonstrated his capacity for thinking in a limitless way about our perplexing existence in this universe and a mind-boggling talent for crafting a complex world and breathtaking sentences from such thinking.

This book does get off to a slow start, but when you realize it is the exposition of a novel that must be, in reality, 2,000 pages long, the complex exposition makes perfect sense. Crowley writes fantasy of unprecedented scope and articulacy, it is fantasy for the thinking person. The "fantasy" pigeonhole is, anyway, misleading. A person who can fully imagine and articulate an alternate way of illuminating our existence is usually called a philosopher. But that label does nothing for Crowley, either.

This book is not for everyone, especially in our short attention span culture. But I think those who are captivated by the vivid, hallucinatory thought and language in this book will be compelled to travel on to the end. If you generally read on a level above vampire stories and torrid romances, please get this book and discover an alternate reality that is the product of one of the most original and eloquent thinker/writers of our time.