Love and Sleep - Hardcover

Crowley, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0553096427 ISBN 13: 9780553096422

Publisher: Bantam, 1994

Synopsis

Pierce Moffett stands at a turning point, when the world is changing from what it has been into what it will be. Is it only a moment in the history of his own soul? Or the course of his generation's progress toward maturity?
As a child Pierce was no stranger to magic. Transplanted from his native Brooklyn to the Cumberland Mountains of Kentucky, he and his cousins formed a secret club called the Invisible College. Fueled by books, adventures, and the imagination of youth, they scratched the surface of ordinary life and found the hints of something glittering and strange underneath. For most children these revelations fade with the coming of adulthood, but for Pierce the search for the hidden history of the world is just beginning.
It is a search that begins with the unfinished manuscript of a writer named Fellowes Kraft and leads to the real-life history of the doomed heretic Giordano Bruno and the Elizabethan metaphysician John Dee. These mysteries reach from past to present, to intertwine themselves with the life of Rosie Rasmussen, who brought Pierce that unfinished manuscript and will be given charge of Pierce's destiny. And as he delves deeper, Pierce begins to apprehend a power beyond reckoning, a knowledge beyond imagining, and a love that can waken sleeping souls.
Only rarely does an author emerge with the vision, the voice, and the courage to speculate on the alchemy that transforms the everyday into something transcendent. Crowley opened the gates to this feared and desired land in his magnificent novel AEgypt. Now he leads us far within.

About this title

From the Publisher:

"From John Crowley, author of Little, Big, comes a major work of American magic realism set in the same realm of infinite possibility as his critically acclaimed Egypt (a New York Times "notable Book" for 1987). Love & Sleep revolves around Pierce Moffett, who as a boy was no stranger to magic, scratching the surface of ordinary life to find something glittering and strange underneath. For most children, these revelations fade with time, but for the adult Pierce -- struggling to retain the youthful vision and innocence of childhood -- the search for the hidden history of the world is just beginning. An eloquent treatise on the secrets of life, Love & Sleep proves Crowley to be one of American literature's most original and valuable treasures.

"John Crowley is an abundantly gifted writer, a scholar whose passion for history is matched by his ability to write a graceful sentence." -- New York Times Book Review.

"Crowley is generous, obsessed, fascinating, gripping. Really, I think Crowley is so good that he has left everybody else in the dust." -- Peter Straub

"A master of language, plot and characterization, Crowley triumphs in this occult and Herrnetic tale, at once naturalistically persuasive and uncannily visionary. Love & Sleep rewards endless rereading, as does Little, Big." -- Harold Bloom, author of The Book Of J.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Crowley (Aegypt, 1987, etc.) struggles to recapture the smooth blending of straight narrative and speculative hermeticism that gave his best work, Little, Big (1981), the startling quality of metaphysical realism. It eludes him, unfortunately, here. Very much a book of levels, as the title's two primal forces indicate, this is the story of a writer named Pierce Moffett, who grew up with his mother and uncle and cousins in rural Kentucky (far removed from his homosexual father back in New York City). Pierce eventually turns into an upstate New York loner, an isolato equipped with paranormal gifts of magic and wisdom that set him more firmly in tune with the music of the spheres than with the lives of his neighbors. The book is a chronicle of Pierce's slow steps into this world (a fuller sex life, learning to drive) but also a charting of the introduction he unwittingly provides to others of a reality off, as it were, to one side of daily conscious life. Crowley adds historical focus in chapters about the struggles of two 16th-century psychic pioneers, the Italian metaphysician Giordano Bruno and the English mage John Dee. These historical sections, though graceful (Crowley is a deliciously elegant writer, sentence by sentence), are heavy dumplings; and though Crowley ultimately and quite strikingly turnbuckles the two levels into one at the end, it feels a lot less than natural and inevitable. The split-vision pretty much weighs down the spring of Pierce's pilgrim's progress into love and eroticism (women, but also a sexual relationship with a 13-year-old boy who is his illegitimate son, a pure Eros figure). In the end, the secret knowledge so sought after here comes to seem a burden the reader would rather shrug off than embrace. Disappointing. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Bantam
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0553096427
• ISBN 13: 9780553096422
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 502