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Las Soledades
“I read this book because of the supposed relationship to the Tool album/song Aenima (the band denies it). I was very pleased with Crowley's excellent writing style. It was a little boring in a few places where he described some unusual details, specifically the way a character's mind worked and how they remembered history. That aside, the suggestion that the way the world and the universe works is continually changing is a fascinating concept. The book also jumped between a group of characters and times which added an extra dimension of interest to the story. A good read and I would recommend it to any one who is interested.”
An amazon user wrote this on 2009-01-22. -
2 of 2 members found this review helpful.
Crowley is an alchemist
“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.
An amazon user wrote this on 2009-01-07.
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.” -
One of the best writers of our time
“John Crowley is one of the best writers of our time. His work is complex, intellectually challenging and emotionally resonant. The Aegypt cycle is more difficult but ultimately even more satisfying than his wonderful novel Little, Big. ”
An amazon user wrote this on 2008-12-16. -
2 of 2 members found this review helpful.
The Searches
“This book seems a rather polarising one to review. Indeed, if one peruses the other six reviews here it is clear that this is more than a bit of an understatement. It was polarising for me as a reader as well. I thought parts of it lovely and wonderful, while other parts seemed arcane to the point of inanity. But, here are my thoughts and impressions, for whatever they're worth to "Crowleyites" and others:
An amazon user wrote this on 2008-12-10.
The best part of the book is Crowley's gentle, poetic prose. It manages to make the least deeds of the characters seem caught up in something grand that is just out of sight - much as, as another reviewer has mentioned, Proust does. Here is an example:
"In the mountains above Rosie's station wagon, deer walked, fattening on the apples of the old orchards; down on the river, fallen leaves floated south, gathering in colored rugs at eddies and backwaters and on the shore of the little pleasure-ground that Spofford owned. At nightfall, a flock of migrating starlings returning to the towers of Butterman's made a banner in the air above the castle that snapped, as though in the wind, before the birds settled to rest." P.228
These sorts of passages are what made the world conveyed here an enchantment for me.
Now to what another reviewer calls the "Neoplatonic/Gnostic" stuff. I've read almost all of Plato, all of Plotinus's Enneads and The Gnostic Religion by Hans Jonas (to whom Crowley mentions his indebtedness in the "To The Reader" section at the beginning here), so I'm not at all unfamiliar with the drawn-out rambling passages in re Bruno and Doctor Dee and Hermes Trismegistus, but they load the book down with unwieldy and, frankly, tiresome baggage. More to the point, they present a danger. The danger is that this book, and the rest of the Aegypt Cycle, will be taken as a sort of substitute for Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code" for the erudite, readers who know Latin and Ancient theology, highbrow conspiracy theorists. That would be a pity indeed. For what The Solitudes seems to me most concerned with is mankind's perennial search for home. As the enigmatic character, Beau, tells Pierce:
"So you don't belong here....You only seem to. You can never say This is where I belong. The best you can say is This is like it. This day, this place. This is like the place where I belong." P.319
This book will strike a chord with many and is recommended to all those for whom poetic writing and a search for a spiritual home carry weight. Just, please, don't get too carried away with the hermetic learning described herein. That way confusion lies and, as Crowley would put it, et hoc genus omne.
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1 of 4 members found this review helpful.
Excellent but Overrated
“I wanted to like this book more than I did. An epic fantasy novel series written as high literature? Hermeticism, parallel universes, alternate histories? It sounds too good to be true. And it is a bit too good to be true.
An amazon user wrote this on 2008-08-27.
There were two looming negatives I encountered. The first is that the plot is relatively dull. Perhaps it picks up in later volumes, but it limps along. Now, a good plot is hardly essential for a literary novel, particularly a modern novel. But this novel does attempt to rely on plot as part of its structure, and there isn't much to rely on. Very little "happens."
The second negative has been noted by another reviewer -- this is a surprisingly generation-bound book. It is written about a scenario in the 1970s by an author who clearly takes that time period as sort of a watershed in human existence. For those like myself, a Gen Xer, or later, it is difficult to stomach Crowley's attitude towards the 60s/70s. "Age of Aquarius" just makes us roll our eyes and snicker, but this book is predicated on taking such a generational attitude seriously. Perhaps you could fault the reader here, but great fantasy easily transcends its historical context -- see, e.g., Tolkien. The parallel that Crowley attempts to strike between the explosion of "spiritual energy" in the 1960s/70s and the Renaissance will, I think, strike most of us in later generations as rather comic (and even a bit nauseating). And for that reason, I suspect his cycle's appeal rapidly decreases for readers at Gen X and beyond -- who would much rather pick up a copy of Marquez.
In short, having read this through to the end, I wish I'd rather just read Giordano Bruno directly and skipped this attempt to express neoplatonic/gnostic ideas through a novel about a relatively tiresome crew of characters in an unappealing setting. So why do I still give it four stars overall? Well, Crowley's skill as a writer is undeniable, and the entire project was an audaciously brilliant one. I did enjoy reading it. Credit must be given. I simply did not feel he pulled it off in an especially moving, entertaining, or (for me) memorable way. It did not live up to the hype.”
