- Paperback: 528 pages
- Publisher: Touchstone; Reprint edition (May 4 1999)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0684859114
- ISBN-13: 978-0684859118
- Product Dimensions: 21.7 x 14 x 3.3 cm
- Shipping Weight: 454 g
- Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (119 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #559,670 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon
In his earlier novels, Robert Stone has taken us to such hot spots as Vietnam, Central America, and that ultimate sinkhole of depravity we call Hollywood. This time around, it's Jerusalem. Given Stone's gift for depicting both political and personal embroilment--indeed, for making the two inextricable--this particular city is an inspired choice. For starters, Jerusalem remains a sacred destination for Muslims, Jews, and Christians and a hotly contested one. It's also a magnet for hustlers, fanatics, and millennial dreamers, a generous assortment of whom populate the pages of Damascus Gate. As always, Stone introduces a (relatively) innocent American into the picture--a journalist named Christopher Lucas. This career skeptic prides himself on his detachment: he prefers the kind of story "that exposed depravity and duplicity on both sides of supposedly uncompromising sacred struggles. He found such stories reassuring, an affirmation of the universal human spirit." Yet Lucas, a lapsed Catholic, has journeyed to Jerusalem at least in part to recharge his devotional batteries. And as he's slowly drawn into a terrorist plot--which involves drugs, arms smuggling, and a plan to blow up the Temple Mount--Lucas sheds his detachment in a hurry. Stone's novel functions as an expert thriller, whose slow, somewhat clunky wind-up is more than compensated for by a brilliant grand finale. It is also, however, a dogged exploration of faith, in which cynics and true believers jostle for predominance. "Life was so self-conscious in Jerusalem," the author reflects, "so lived at close quarters, by competing moralizers. Every little blessing demanded immediate record." It's hard to imagine a more vivid record of these mutual blessings--and maledictions!--than Robert Stone's.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
From Publishers Weekly
From its sublime triumphs to its noble failures, Stone's first novel since Outerbridge Reach (1993) is a major work in every aspect, a sprawling, discordant prose symphony. In Jerusalem, which he depicts as a holy Bedlam, Stone finds the perfect setting for the spiritual agonies that have marked his most powerful writing. In that city, everyone suffers from the burden of faith, or lack of it, and everyone wants something, usually at any price. Expat American journalist Christopher Lucas wants a surer identity?born Christian and Jewish, he feels rooted to neither faith?as well as love and, of course, a good story. But his desire has limits, drawn by conscience, and so he serves well as the reader's proxy, a normal man surrounded by seekers of the absolute. Around Lucas swirl addled saints, addicted sinners, con men, cruel members of Hamas and even crueler Israeli security forces. All the parties have their own agendas, most of which hinge on a conspiracy among extremist Israeli Jews and American Christians to blow up the Temple Mount and usher in Armageddon. Stone's presentation of this narrative backbone can be mechanical and sometimes seems extraneous to the novel's main theme of the wages of faith. More captivating is an ancillary plot involving a drug-blasted seeker's attempts to elevate a manic-depressive Jew as a world savior; one of his pawns, Sonia Barnes, an American Sufi who's also Lucas's love interest, proves as compelling as any Stone heroine. Most extraordinary, though, is the author's passionate etching of landscapes both physical and spiritual. The book opens slowly, with a diffuse if portentous ramble through the city, though the narrative intensifies through scenes of terror and moral gravity?particularly in a nightmare Gaza strip inflamed by riot?until Jerusalem and its people coalesce to iridescent indelibility. Bold and bracing, ambitious and inspired, Damascus Gate is, even for its flaws, an astonishment. 100,000 first printing; $150,000 ad/promo.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
First Sentence
THAT MORNING Lucas was awakened by bells, sounding across the Shoulder of Hinnom from the Church of the Dormition. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
THAT MORNING Lucas was awakened by bells, sounding across the Shoulder of Hinnom from the Church of the Dormition. Read the first page
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Concordance
Browse Sample PagesConcordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
2.0 out of 5 stars
What's the point?,
By Roger Gilman (St. Paul, MN United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Damascus Gate (Paperback)
Self-indulgent and genuinely socially irrelevant. This is another of those long, "brilliant, thoughtful" books in which the author cynically chooses to wander aimlessly along the edges of (Israeli) society and then make it look relevant and dramatic by eventually throwing in some stock political action, like a terrorist bombing. I've now listened to three of fourteen cassettes in the audio edition, wondering for at least the last 90 minutes if there's any point in continuing. I like historical and political novels, well-considered mysteries and thrillers, and penetrating character studies. They don't have to start quickly, but they do have to show some depth and desire to pull me into a world that's worth being part of for awhile. I don't see or feel any of that here so far, just a lot of superficial meanderings, with outlandish rather than unique characters (to wit, the most soulful character so far is apparently bi-polar). I've recently wasted time with another book of this type. No reason to throw more good time after bad.
1.0 out of 5 stars
Boring, irrelevant, slow, and misleading,
By A Customer
This review is from: Damascus Gate (Paperback)
The back cover of "Damascus Gate" offers a summary of what the reader should expect to discover inside. The first two sentences of the summary are as follows: "On the cusp of the millennium, Jerusalem has become a battleground in the race for redemption. American journalist Christopher Lucas is investigating religious fanatics when he discovers a plot to bomb the sacred Temple Mount."I reached page 50 of 500 (in the paperback) and was disappointed that the excitement of the bombing plot had not yet been revealed to Lucas. I thought, "it's just got to be right around the corner." So, I kept reading. Page 75, no plot. Page 100, no plot. Page 125, no plot. Page 150, no plot. At that point, I decided that if the book is really this slow to get to the promised excitement (and the blurb on the back this misleading), I did not want to continue. I put the book down and am now loving "The DaVinci Code." Yet, deception and pace are not the only reasons I stopped reading this book. In a land filled with Jews, Muslims, and Christians, the author, Robert Stone, has managed to write a book whose key characters are a Sufi, a Jew for Jesus, and a half Jew/half Christian. Page 132 begins: "We're all mutants here. De Kuff became a Catholic, communion every morning. I was with Jews for Jesus. Sonia is a Sufi, she was a Communist." If you like a slow read about fringe personas, not particularly relevant to the struggle over the Holy Land, I recommend this book to you. However, if you are picking up this book because of your interest in the region and its people, skip it and move to the next book on your reading list.
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Total Trip,
By
This review is from: Damascus Gate (Hardcover)
I found this book to be haunting, cautionary, and at the some time both hallucinogenic and sweetly human. It comes highly recommended, offering a unique and balanced glimpse and the confusion, misery and hope of the world's most troubled region while taking the reader on a magic carpet ride worthy of Kerouac.
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