Damascus Gate [Abridged] [Audio Cassette]

Scott Lasser (Author), Ethan Hawke (Narrator)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1999

With soaring vision and profound intelligence, Robert Stone has written a harrowing, breathtaking novel about our desperate search, at any price, for the consolation of redemption - and about the people who are all too willing to provide it. A violent confrontation in the Gaza Strip, a mind-altering pilgrimage, a race through riot-filled Jerusalem streets, a cat-and-mouse game in an underground maze, a desperate attempt to prevent a bomb from detonating beneath the Temple Mount - Damascus Gate is an exhilarating journey through the moral and religious ambiguities that haunt the holiest of cities and its seekers, cynics, hustlers, and madmen. Set in Jerusalem, where violence, ecstasy, heresy, and salvation are all to be found, Damascus Gate is simultaneously the story of a man's search for truth - or some version of it - and the story of a city where sanity is casually traded for faith.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

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 an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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 an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Audio Cassette
• Publisher: Publishing Mills; Abridged edition (September 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 157511058X
• ISBN-13: 978-1575110585
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5 x 3.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (126 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,844,726 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

ROBERT STONE is the author of seven novels: A Hall of Mirrors, Dog Soldiers (winner of the National Book Award), A Flag for Sunrise, Children of Light, Outerbridge Reach, Damascus Gate, and Bay of Souls. His story collection, Bear and His Daughter, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and his memoir, Prime Green, was published in 2006.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

81 of 87 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A difficult but brilliant work, January 24, 2000

By 

Doug Vaughn - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Damascus Gate (Hardcover)

The range of evaluations for this book in the customer reviews is all the way from one star to five. Having read and thoroughly enjoyed Robert Stone's Damascus Gate, I have to wonder why the numerous one and two star reviews. The most frequent criticisms are ones that are quite true: the book is long on description, it is very complex, there are a lot of characters and much of the situation in which the plot unfolds must be inferred since the author doesn't spell it out for us.

Nevertheless, the writing is brilliant. This is a book for people who love reading; not for people who simply want a good story with familiar characters and a predictable conclusion. Stone spends a lot of time in this book really setting the stage before the plot is even unwound. To readers who are impatient to 'get on with the story', this approach is going to be frustrating. But to readers who appreciate what Stone does with language and can revel in the images created, this part of the book is a pleasure in itself.

I would not recommend this book to everyone. It does require more effort and concentration than a typical thriller (just as Le Carre does) and the pleasures derived from the character and plot presuppose a reader more in tune with Graham Greene than with Grisham. The author wants us to think long and hard about what we are reading and he has done an admirable job of creating a scenario where all the forces that have made the middle east a consistently unstable place are shown coming together in the crisis situation the plot leads to. I found this book very satisfying.

23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Less than thrilling, December 16, 2001

By 

John Harding (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Damascus Gate (Paperback)

You have to wonder about a book that features no fewer than 47 recommendations spread over 6 pages and the front and back covers. Daphne Merkin (The New Yorker) states that this is "[t]he definitive book about Israel," and other reviewers are no less ecstatic. I found Damascus Gate to be a good book, with significant strengths and weaknesses. It was the quality (and quantity) of the reviews, however, that prompted me to write this comment of my own.

Another recent author who has written about Israel, Herman Wouk, has his narrator in Inside, Outside (Avon, 1987) make the following point: "That is an absolute literary gold mine, alienation." This, I believe, goes a long way towards explaining the reception of DG among its enthusiastic middle- and high-brow critics. DG is really the definitive book, not of Israel but of alienation.

The main protagonist is a detached Catholic/Jewish writer, the product of an illegitimate union, who fervently wants a faith he cannot himself embrace. Lucas, alternately admitting and denying his identity, suffers from physical alienation as well: he is largely impotent (although cured by a good woman, thank you for asking). Stone also invests him with a fashionable drinking habit and a mysterious source of income.

How can any reviewer with intellectual pretensions not fall in love with Lucas? He is a tortured soul enjoying a pleasant bohemian lifestyle in interesting surroundings. This was my college fantasy as well. Stone sets the mood for this wonderfully: the pages are littered with erudite expressions in Latin, Hebrew and Arabic; there are references to Noam Chomsky, Fats Waller, the Zohar, Miles Davis, Sufism and "the Jew-despising [T.S.] Eliot" (p. 136). It makes you want to congratulate yourself for that humanities degree you took.

There are two primary problems with DG. First, for a "thriller" it is surprisingly slow ("turgid" would be another description). The book only picks up about half way through (our first dead body - and not a very interesting one - appears at p. 177), and only a critic of literary fiction, who presumably does not ordinarily read actual thrillers, would be surprised by the ending.

The second problem is more serious, and is the flatness of the characterization. All Stone's characters sounded much the same to me, even Sonia, who is female, one half African-American and a sufi. Apart from a few cursory efforts by Stone to imbue her language with "color," Sonia's speech is much like that of Lucas, or any other character.

Stone's tin ear tends to eliminate any depth of character, and perhaps the most damning criticism of DG is that, when the book offers "study questions" about what Sonia (Q 15) and Lucas (Q 19) will do after the conclusion of the story, I could no more imagine them doing anything than I could imagine puppets at the end of a show reaching up to cut their strings and running off to lead productive lives in journalism and international humanitarian relief.

Having made these criticisms, I should mention also that DG has some excellent moments: Lucas running from an enraged mob in the Gaza Strip; a gathering of savior and disciples, who make their final "preparations" before entering Jerusalem; and the rumored appearance of Salman Rushdie at a riot in the City.

Stone is at his best when narrating a rapid series of events. Leave him alone with a character's thoughts, however, such as those of Lucas after he spends an unintended vigil at the Holy Sepulchre, and you get the awful dreck found at pages 295-296. At his worst moments, Stone seems to disappear up his own pyge (erudite, eh?), rather like the ouroboros symbol/metaphor that appears throughout DG.

23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Challenging, December 2, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Damascus Gate (Paperback)

I appreciate novels which have ideas and make me consider the validity of my world-view. Stone is not a favorite of mine, but this is a novel of such profound beauty that I can't find the words to describe it. I hope those who look for meaningful, richly textured novels as a source of personal joy will give this book a chance.