- Hardcover: 258 pages
- Publisher: Viking Pr; First UK Edition edition (Dec 1987)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0670813524
- ISBN-13: 978-0670813520
- Product Dimensions: 22.6 x 15.5 x 2.8 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,398,959 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Synopsis
Drawing heavily on Egyptian mythology, this visionary novel follows Joe the Dead, Kim Carsons, Neferti, Hassan i Sabbah, and the Old Man of the Mountains on their hazardous pilgrimage toward immortality.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
17 of 17 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I believe 'The Western Lands' is Burroughs' last novel, and it shows. It is written in a tone that tells you it is a last novel, like Vonnegut's 'Timequake', and like 'Timequake' it carries with it a poignant melancholy. Burroughs finishes his trilogy which began with Cities Of The Red Night and continued with The Place Of Dead Roads by giving us a retrospective of what feels like all of his work. Junky is in here, as is Queer, The Naked Lunch, and everything in between. As usual he throws together war-films, pornography, and science fiction with the ease of a chef mixing eggs and flour. The result is an exciting, vibrant, and even touching novel that dances to its end like the carnival of the twentieth century. While Naked Lunch will always be the cult Burroughs novel, Western Lands is, for me, the one in which he seals his fate as America's greatest writer of the last century.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
I found this to be by far the best fiction Burroughs wrote.I was never that comfortable with the cut and paste technique,or copious amounts of gay sex,body fluids,drugs and horror.I persisted mainly due to his interests in the esoteric and his perceptive insight in humanities dark corners.
Thankfully in this,his last book, he tones what I considered to be "just for the sake of it" shock factor down, and almost follows a traditional narrative (well almost),sparingly interspersed with stream of consciousness writing and what appear to be dream recall sequences.The book also contains an intriguing mix of Egyptian mythology,centipede cult worship,vampirism and toxicology,along with an array of concepts,situations and horrors from Burroughs own imagination.
Overall I'd say this is the authors most accessible and entertaining work,and while still retaining an air of abstraction,temporal distortion and general twistedness it is markedly more coherent than his earlier fiction.
Thankfully in this,his last book, he tones what I considered to be "just for the sake of it" shock factor down, and almost follows a traditional narrative (well almost),sparingly interspersed with stream of consciousness writing and what appear to be dream recall sequences.The book also contains an intriguing mix of Egyptian mythology,centipede cult worship,vampirism and toxicology,along with an array of concepts,situations and horrors from Burroughs own imagination.
Overall I'd say this is the authors most accessible and entertaining work,and while still retaining an air of abstraction,temporal distortion and general twistedness it is markedly more coherent than his earlier fiction.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
16 reviews
12 of 15 people found the following review helpful
The Voice from the Mirror
20 July 2008
Format:Paperback
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].
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].
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Burroughs's best work. Period.
17 July 1999
Format:Paperback
The Western Lands has all the scatter-brained and scatological charm that any of WSB's finest portrays, but not only is this particular story, the third installment of the Cities of the Red Night trilogy, form at its best, the content transcends anything else he's written. In his old age, WSB had an incredible emotional sadness about him, and this novel, which becomes semi-autobiographical at its end, leaves you profoundly touched in a way Naked Lunch never did and few novels ever can. The whole thing is worth reading if nothing else for the Wishing Box chapter at the work's conclusion.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
a true coming to an end of an ever searching genius
19 Aug 1998
Format:Paperback
The trilogy to which this lucid novel belongs marked a slowing down of pace for this writer who had become so renown for his soaring and shocking books. Yet, especially in Place of the Dead Roads and Western Lands, his vision sinks in far more deeply and the sheer beauty of its imagery is the light behind the doors of perception which his previous work has kicked in. Always someone who showed no mercy to those who wanted to hide from reality and whose words were like bullets, here in the final part Burroughs grabs you by the throat by talking to you in a unexpectedly human voice of a world beyond death and humanity. He always was a poet, but here he truly sings, be it a swan song.
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