A vast jigsaw puzzle where something important happens | The Western Lands

The Voice from the Mirror | The Western Lands | William S. Burroughs

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	• The Western Lands William S. Burroughs Penguin (Non-Classics), 1988 - 272 pages average customer review:based on 16 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Best Burroughs Novel

Yes, that is a bold statement, but my opinion is unwavering. Perhaps not as shocking or unnerving as Naked Lunch, it still retains Burroughs' unique bite - his untimid voice.

This novel took me a complete two years to read, a sharp contrast to the two days it took me to read Naked Lunch. The intensity of his prose allowed me only to read a couple pages per day before I had to put it down and process his words. I felt throughout the novel I had to read each sentence several times, but it never bored me. In fact, the deeper I looked into each prose, the more and more I began understanding the man.

What made Naked Lunch so succesful was perhaps the array of inventive characters and thier situations. The most common character in The Western Lands happens to be Burroughs himself. Much of the novel is dedicated to him coming to terms with his approaching death.

It only became apparent to me later in the novel the situation in which Burroughs wrote. I feel like if I had realized the complete lack of social contact this man had, the better I would have read the earlier pages. By the time he wrote The Western Lands he has shot his wife, lost his lust and beatnik commrades.

I've now read a majority of Burroughs' novels. After reading this one, however, I'm going to find it hard to go back and finish his collection. There is simply no way they can be a thought compelling and inventive as this one.

I recommend this novel only to those familiar with his work. It is in no way a good first read, but if you are impressed with his earlier works I highly suggest this most impressive read!

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A vast jigsaw puzzle where something important happens

A rude and violent book of Burroughs which make think of Naked Lunch in the really violent moments with huge explosions and international conspirations. But this book is really hardcore and well done in the sense that it is the third book of the trilogy composed of Cities of the Red Night, Dead Roads. This book is the way to the land of the deads which is a difficult road with various cut-ups and flash forward. It is in a sense the new mythology for the electronic area, Burroughs imagine what it would be like if the pharaos lived in the subliminal electronic age, what humanity would be if the great moments of the world history where trapped with this sort of plot.
In the same time Burroughs create a new piece to assemble in his huge jigsaw puzzle, where secret agents mixed with Egyptian mythology, and where the symbolic discovered by the pharaos was a key to the new symbolic interpretation of our times.

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The Voice from the Mirror

It's sad that since his death, the star of William S. Burroughs has been fading. But when this book was first released, I was working as the night foreman in a municipal garage in Detroit. I spent haunted Saturday nights at my desk, near the emergency phone, reading "The Western Lands" and when a worker came into the office, I'd read aloud from it. After a while, other workers came in and listened.

These man were white trash and those of the African persuasion. Some were hipsters, others were devout Christians. They could've been sleeping, they could've been goofing off, but they all seemed to understand what I was reading, and at certain passages the black guys would hoot and give each other "high fives."

Who IS this guy? they asked. They (we) all hated English class and hated being force-fed "literature." This, however, was something else.

I think poorly of literary critics, and it really matters little, in the long run, what their opinions are. What matters is that old Bill Lee wrote the obvious truth in such a way that it cut past the [horsefeathers].

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The West Is The Best.

Review: Contains highly condensed scenarios in past present and future time. Rarefied and raw dream and after-death encounters and conflicts, with unforgettable characters in a multitude of hilarious satiric black humor routines, will stab you in the ribs with a poisoned quill. Not for the squeamish, dogmatic or uninformed. ¡novel biological mutations! Step right up. William S. Burroughs' examination of the function of the author is so candid and deeply moving that its authenticity can't be denied. The poems, "Breathe in your death" and "I WORK FOR THE BLACK HOLE,..." are, respectively, an exquisite cut-up and an informed, funny post-scientific verse. Who can award a Commander of Arts and Letters of this caliber less than 5 stars?

Like to offer a few simple pointers to help in navigating through this most accomplished and inspired of Burroughs' works. Starting with the title "The Western Lands," which in ancient Egyptian would read "Amenta," referring to the land of the dead who, by tradition, were always entombed to the west of Egypt. In present time, the most potent power accumulation is concentrated in the West. Suddenly you might recognize Western Culture as overwhelmed by material wealth, wielding the technology for total dominance/destruction, but metaphysically only "minutes away" from total bankruptcy. Burroughs wastes no words over this formula: spiritual bankruptcy = death. Species disappearing from the planet faster than the rising national debts.

Most important to understand, ladies and gentlemen, the possibility of much of his fiction as factual analogs. He delineates the 7 souls, Hollywood style, with deadly humor. The existence of Immortality isn't just the question of an eccentric old man. It's a question all civilizations face, and there's nothing frivolous about it when a dying culture sees it has no answers. Naturally, (profiting from the course of collapse) Nazis, Mafias, CIA, KGB and other boards and syndicates all have walk-on parts. All all all only to be topped and toppled by the inexorable expansion of the white light of Margaras (Skt.). The cat Margaras is the agent of total awareness and observation. Break this book open at any page and be amazed.

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The West Is The Best.

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