The Waste Land Paperback – September 15, 2012

As a fan of The Waste Land, I was looking forward to this book, but I have to squint to read the text. The graphics are SO DARK. I understand this is film noir aesthetic, but page after page of unreadable and undecipherable text means the book is useless. The footnotes at the back are helpful at pointing out what to look for on the page.

This crazy book only works if you care about T S Eliot's The Waste Land to begin with. If you do, and if you don't know it by heart, download a copy and read the two together. I haven't had such a fun time reading for a very long time! Read, laugh, love, and feel swept away by the inventiveness of pop culture.

The author's unique angle on Eliot's poem didn't do much to clear up my fuzzy impressions of The Waste Land, but projecting it through the prism of Chandler's fiction was both original and interesting.

Martin Rowson's brilliantly destructive parody of T.S. Eliot's modernist poem has had its teeth drawn in this UK edition. Harassed by the lawyers for Eliot's estate claiming violation of copyright, Rowson has been forced to make changes in the text that make total nonsense of the artist's intentions. (For example, "Phlebas the Phoenician" in part four becomes, inanely, "Mike the Minoan.") USA law protects parodies from this kind of legal intrusion, so buy the American edition which retains Rowson's original intentions.

I gather from other reviews that this Penguin edition, and not the reprint that omits much of Eliotic Waste Land content, is the one to read. Pity that the Penguin isn't more generally available. It's also a pity that Amazon continues to conflate reviews of disparate editions, placing them under EVERY edition, despite different publishers, translators, ISBN numbers, etc. Get a used Penguin from abebooks, not the Seagull Books edition that everyone resents.That said, I wavered between 4 and 5 stars and opted for the latter. "Clever" seldom merits the highest praise, but Rowson is here supremely clever, unobtrusively learned, and even if the plotline of his Raymond Chandler/Dashiell Hammett-inspired literary thriller/dingus-quest breaks down in places and leads to puzzlement rather than illumination, author/penciler/inker/letterer Rowson is neverless a sui generis kind of "sequential art" (Will Eisner's term of choice) narrative genius. At points, he genuinely illuminates Eliot's poem, has clearly studied the Eliotic canon and worked nuggets of Prufrock, Sweeney, Four Quartets, etc. into his Waste Land, which, in its illustrations alone, hits Eliot's despairing mark. Rowson also incorporates (often forcing in) large chunks of Eliot's distinctive words and phrases - "in and out the women go...", e.g. - that generations now of smarty pants routinely toss off (and wait for others to complete).I also immensely enjoyed Rowson's large cast of walk-on cameos, beautifully rendered by the artist's distinctive hand, and was delighted to find he provides a key for all the cluttered panels (save one: the last) in the penultimate concluding page.So Bravo! Love Rowson's work, his Tristram Shandy, his editorial cartoons, and look forward to more of him.

...as the author for dissenting. I think the new Seagull edition - which reprints the changes made to the 1990 Penguin [UK] edition as a result of pressure from the Eliot estate - has just as much merit as the legally untouched US edition. In some ways, it has the added dimension, in what is almost a text book example of a post-modern construct, of going beyond parodying or pastiching inter textually and addressing the whole status of The Waste Land as legally protected "great poetry". ( For the record, I still think it stinks, as I explain in a 1999 article reprinted from the Independent on Sunday in this Seagull edition' so I'd argue it's worth getting hold of for that reason alone, for students truly interested in my intentions.) And, to be frank, I still think the way I got round the copyright restrictions on the line "Jug jug jug jug jug jug" is pretty funny. Remember, I produced this book originally as satire, not as homage. Reverence therefore takes a backIn order to post this Amazon have obliged me to rate the book, however distasteful I find this, but I have no problems whatsoever with this edition, and indeed thank and applaud those excellent people at Seagull for bringing the thing back into print.Martin RowsonLondon

Very funny and thought provoking. Take care - the edition with a yellow cover is a reprint and the drawings are darker and less clear than in the original - which has a cover with Eliot holding a handful of dust.Very entertaining in its own right, but also well worth reading because he picks up details in the original poem that make you want to re-read Eliot's poem again. Brilliant in the way he weaves imagery from 1940s film noir into the 'narrative' of the poem.

Good service and a good price, but disappointing product quality. It's clearly been scanned from an original (I have an original), and the image quality is not great. If you've never seen it before, it's worth getting - though you should read this version in a bright light!

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