Damascus [Deckle Edge] [Paperback]

Joshua Mohr (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 18, 2011

"Damascus succeeds in conveying a big-hearted vision." —The Wall Street Journal


"At once gripping, lucid and fierce, Damascus is the mature effort of an artist devoted to personal growth and as such contains the glints of real gold." -San Francisco Chronicle

It's 2003 and the country is divided evenly for and against the Iraq War. Damascus, a dive bar in San Francisco's Mission District, becomes the unlikely setting for a showdown between the opposing sides.

Tensions come to a boil when Owen, the bar's proprietor who has recently taken to wearing a Santa suit full-time, agrees to host the joint's first (and only) art show by Sylvia Suture, an ambitious young artist who longs to take her act to the dramatic precipice of the high-wire by nailing live fish to the walls as a political statement.

An incredibly creative and fully rendered cast of characters orbit the bar. There's No Eyebrows, a cancer patient who has come to the Mission to die anonymously; Shambles, the patron saint of the hand job; Revv, a lead singer who acts too much like a lead singer; and Owen, donning his Santa costume to mask the most unfortunate birthmark imaginable.

Damascus is the place where confusion and frustration run out of room to hide. By gracefully tackling such complicated topics as cancer, Iraq, and issues of self-esteem, Joshua Mohr has painted his most accomplished novel yet.

Joshua Mohr is the San Francisco Chronicle best-selling author of Some Things That Meant the World to Me and Termite Parade, a New York Times Book Review editors' choice selection.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Joshua Mohr: Joshua Mohr is the author of the San Francisco Chronicle bestseller, Some Things That Meant the World to Me, and Termite Parade, a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice. He is a regular contributor to The Rumpus, and lives in San Francisco where he teaches writing.

Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Two Dollar Radio (October 18, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0982684894
• ISBN-13: 978-0982684894
• Product Dimensions: 7.4 x 5.6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (28 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #845,289 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

JOSHUA MOHR is the author of the novels "Termite Parade," an Editors' Choice on The New York Times Best Seller List, and "Some Things that Meant the World to Me," one of O Magazine's Top 10 reads of 2009 and a SF Chronicle best-seller. His most recent novel is "Damascus" about which the New York Times said:

"The author's jaunty voice [is] Beat-poet cool...Mohr nails the atmosphere of a San Francisco still breathing in the smoke that lingers from the days of Jim Jones and Dan White, a time when passionate ideologies and personal dysfunction intermingled and combusted."

Mohr teaches in the MFA program at the University of San Francisco and has published numerous short stories and essays in publications such as The New York Times Book Review, 7×7, the Bay Guardian, ZYZZYVA, The Rumpus, among many others. Please visit him at joshuamohr.net.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Good times at Damascus.... October 13, 2011

By Lauren Saft

Format:Paperback

This is Mohr's third, and hands down best book. Heart-wrenching and hilarious, the book follows typical Mohr-esque degenerates through the dingy underbelly of the San Francisco Mission bar scene. Despite the desperate characters and squalid setting, there is a charm and sparkle to the novel that lets "Damascus" leave you with a smile, despite its dark premise and undertones. There is an underlying humor and absurdity, which Mohr uses expertly to illuminate the subtext surrounding the national and political context of the book. The novel is inherently sad, yet beautiful in the way its people, places, sounds, smells, triumphs and despairs are weaved together through the crafty and sharp prose. It's a punch in the face and the gut and leaves you knowing exactly what Mohr was trying to say. I laughed. I cried. I recommend this book to anyone who likes anything that makes you feel something.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Subject yourself to hope. October 15, 2011

By Jon Boulier

Format:Paperback

A shining and stellar achievement for the good guys of literature. I think a lot of immediate comparison for Mohr is going to be like, Bukowski-meets-whoever, or something - but I think any of those comparisons would be sadly miscalculated. Though maybe Bukowski on his better days, when he's put the bottle down for a minute to pet his cats.

There's grit, and chemicals, and PETA might cringe, but all of it's done with care and love and some serious understanding about the way our hearts work. If you're looking to read a book and be moved; if you're looking to read something that will make you walk away feeling smarter and more hopeful about the world; if you want to giggle like a little girl, or have your eyes well-up in the very first chapter of your next book, read it.

I recommend to anyone who wants to feel like somebody out there writing books still cares about something. And, I recommend it to people also, who are struggling with their own chemical and worldly prisons, who simply want to open their arms, for once, to the world and feel like it doesn't always have to slap them in the face.

Well worth it.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Depressing, raw and packed with emotion. February 12, 2012

By Richard Thomas

Format:Kindle Edition

[This book review originally ran at The Nervous Breakdown.]

As usual, Amazon wants to sensor my reviews. Why publish the books if I can't talk about them?

Damascus (Two Dollar Radio) is a depressing, raw, and touching novel, the latest tale of lost misfits and depraved losers from Joshua Mohr. Here we find Owen, the owner of the bar Damascus, who dresses as Santa Claus, a man with a birthmark under his nose that makes him look like a modern day Hitler. There is a man dying of cancer, No Eyebrows, who simply wants to be touched. There is Shambles, the ****-*** queen, who is willing to do just that, her marriage recently ended in divorce, haunting the late night bars with no purpose or goal in mind. There is Revv, the bartender, a tattooed drunk whose last act may be one of cowardice. And there is Syl, a controversial artist who brings a wave of doom upon the bar, stirring up trouble from war veterans by depicting dead soldiers in her painting while nailing fish to the already stagnant walls of Damascus.

The competing story lines offer up several different characters to follow. One of the ways that Mohr grounds this story, however, is by repeating a chorus of what's happening in the real world, beyond the closed door, dark room, and blackouts of the seedy bar, Damascus. Take this example:

"There were other things happening in the world, of course...Three more American soldiers were killed in Iraq; five in Afghanistan. There were severe floods in the Tabasco and Chiapas regions of Mexico, killing about 3,000, though that was a conservative estimate. Iran reiterated that it was cultivating a nuclear program solely for energy production...."

These moments that break with the narrative allow us to not only ground the novel in the reality of the time and place that was 2003, but to show that despite the enormity of the lives that are fracturing at Damascus, the world is still spinning, and there is more to life than one little bar full of problems. Mohr says essentially that, later in the novel:

"And there were other things happening in the world, of course, because our lives all spin on the same spit. Seconds and heartbeats don't stop until the clockwork breaks and the arteries dam."

But most of the time, we are trapped at Damascus, wallowing in the lives of the broken men and women that inhabit the dive bar. One of the ways that Mohr makes this story come to life is in the gritty depictions of his main characters. Take this introductory description of No Eyebrows from the first chapter of the book:

"Owen placed the huge shot down on the bar, and as No Eyebrows reached for it with a shaking hand, Shambles looked at his sallow skin, the way it clung to him like a layer of film on cold chicken broth. Most people were shocked by his appearance because he reinforced the fact that everyone was going to die. People pursed their lips and averted their eyes, shaming him into near invisibility with the verve of their avoidances, trying not to ogle the prowling dead."

This is a brutal and honest illustration of No Eyebrows. But Mohr doesn't stop there. Shambles makes her living ******* *** men in the bathroom, earning forty dollars a pop. She's no beauty queen either. Reminiscent of Charles Bukowksi and Barfly, here is a quick sketch of Shambles:

"There were a few female regulars, and one who haunted the place was Shambles. She had acne scars all over her cragged cheeks, pocked like the mirror-shards glued to the bar's ceiling. Skin crimped. Her hair had been bleached too many times: tips brittle, broken, crooked. Frayed bangs that fell down to her eyebrows and pointed a million directions like tassels. Her eyes used to be blue, but they'd faded to matte gray."

At least we know what we're getting ourselves into with this story. The punches won't be pulled. We're given a sober description of the men and women of this run down drinking hole.

While the storyline about the politics of Syl's art show, and Owen's desire to make something of his life are interesting, the most compelling thread, in my opinion, is the relationship between Shambles and No Eyebrows. At first, No Eyebrows just wants to be touched, the disease eating away at him, forcing him to leave his wife and daughter so they don't have to watch him wither away to nothing. Take this scene, the first time that Shambles ***** *** No Eyebrows, in the bar's tiny, run down bathroom in the back:

"`Do you like that?' she said, and he said, `Don't stop touching me," and someone knocked on the door again and No Eyebrows threw his head back: every disappearing detail of his disappearing life dwindled while Shambles touched his body, and he felt pleasure, actual pleasure, this was the first hand on him in months that didn't belong to a doctor or nurse, and thirty seconds later he ****, gasping for air and life and hope."

At first, the **** **** that happen in the back of the bar are just further depressing examples of how low Shambles has sunk. This is what her life has been reduced to--getting drunk in some crappy bar in San Francisco's Mission District, making forty bucks at a time pleasuring lonely, ugly men. But as the story develops, we see that she wants more than that, and she starts to care for No Eyebrows, to have feelings for him. And that can only complicate things--how do you start a relationship with a man that you met performing *** ***** in the back of a bar? And how does Shambles get over her own fears and insecurities?

This novel is not without humor though. The characters of Mohr's narrative often laugh at themselves and the situations they have to endure in order to survive. Take this exchange between Maya, Shambles and Karla, three of the bar's ladies of the night:

"`I hate it when men try to be charming,' Maya said. `Nothing weirder than getting a guy out of the bar and he turns into a philosopher.'

`That's why I keep them in Damascus's bathroom,' Shambles said. `No time to recite Shakespeare while my hand's in their business.'

Karla snapped into the flow of the conversation: `I once took a guy home and while he **** he shouted, "It was a dark and stormy night!"'

`What did you do?'

`What could I do? He's a meteorologist.'"

BADUM-BUM. Scattered throughout the novel there are bad jokes, and there are good jokes, but either way, they break up the tone and give the reader a moment to relax and take a breath, to understand that even in the depth of certain misery, these people often had a good time.

For a long time our world is only Damascus. But towards the end of the novel, when No Eyebrows goes home, we finally get his name, David, and the humanity of his need to be loved, his desire to leave and spare his family the pain of watching him die--it all slams back into focus, in a remarkably touching way. When we see Shambles meet up with her ex-husband in the final pages, and discover that she has a name too, Irene, we see that she is not done fighting, still trying to reach out and find a reason to keep on living, not just surviving. And these moments are rather fulfilling.

In Damascus, Joshua Mohr paints a picture that is thankfully not a romantic, nostalgic telling of what life is like as a barfly, sleeping on pool tables, waking up with illegible tattoos, lives and homes fractured, destroyed in the aftermath of selfish, ignorant behavior. He tells it how it is, in simple, graphic, raw words that leave no room for misinterpretation. If nothing else, you'll emerge from Damascus thanking the stars that twinkle in broken shards of glass suspended over your head, that this is not your life. Read more ›

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Redemption Shall Smell of Rotten Fish November 4, 2011

By Charles Mandell

Format:Paperback

With the backdrop of America's age of terror, a cast of urban refugees -- No Eyebrows, Shambles, Daphne, and Rev -- haunts the seedy dive of Damascus, seeking asylum from the battlefields of their pasts. Their lives are rendered with humor, humanity, and fresh detail, to create an environment as rich as Casablanca's, and much like that seedy gin joint reflected the undaunted souls of a previous era, Damascus tells of the broken loves and scarred consciences that speak to our own war-torn present, where the battlefields are both a world away and deep within.

Under the gritty surface of these characters, beats the conflicted heart of America as it sinks into war, and Mohr has triumphed in creating a work of multiple interpretations, for Damascus isn't merely a tale of seedy romantics grasping for meaning and absolution. Rather, Mohr triumphs in creating an allegory of internal conflict, of speech and repression, of courage in the face of fear. Damascus is America exposed, naked in its grotesque beauty, and by stripping away its deceptions and twisted thrills, he brings a narrative of hope for these cynical times, availing redemption to Damascus, to its characters, and the rest of us.

5.0 out of 5 stars Great author May 9, 2013

By Diane L. Mohr

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

This author is captivating, sarcastic....so realistic and he sometimes takes you places you don't want to go. Get this book!