Damascus
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4.0 • 42 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
WINNER - Best Fiction, Victorian Premier's Literary Awards
'They kill us, they crucify us, they throw us to beasts in the arena, they sew our lips together and watch us starve. They bugger children in front of their mothers and violate men in front of their wives. The temple priests flay us openly in the streets. We are hunted everywhere and we are hunted by everyone ...
We are despised, yet we grow. We are tortured and crucified and yet we flourish. We are hated and still we multiply. Why is that? You have to wonder, how is it that we not only survive but we grow stronger?'
Christos Tsiolkas' stunning new novel Damascus is a work of soaring ambition and achievement, of immense power and epic scope, taking as its subject nothing less than events surrounding the birth and establishment of the Christian church. Based around the gospels and letters of St Paul, and focusing on characters one and two generations on from the death of Christ, as well as Paul (Saul) himself, Damascus nevertheless explores the themes that have always obsessed Tsiolkas as a writer: class, religion, masculinity, patriarchy, colonisation, exile; the ways in which nations, societies, communities, families and individuals are united and divided - it's all here, the contemporary and urgent questions, perennial concerns made vivid and visceral.
In Damascus, Tsiolkas has written a masterpiece of imagination and transformation: an historical novel of immense power and an unflinching dissection of doubt and faith, tyranny and revolution, and cruelty and sacrifice.
Customer Reviews
Damascene conversation
3.5 stars
Author
Australian. Five previous novels including Loaded, The Slap, and Barracuda. Many awards and award nominations. Also a playwright, essayist and screen writer.
Premise
No biggie, just the birth and establishment of the Christian church based on the writings of St Paul.
Plot
Told from viewpoints of a series of fictional characters alive a generation or two after Christ. Life under Roman occupation, the powerful influence of religion, the diseases and other hardships endured early in the first millennium are keenly evoked. Some may be troubled by lurid details about bodily secretions of various types, horrible deaths, and primitive sexual mores.
Characters
Saul (later Paul), and a Turkish woman named Lydia are the best most developed. Lydia gets a mention in the first letter to the Corinthians; Tsiolkas gives her a voice.
Prose
Opens powerfully with a young women being stoned to death, and continues in the same vein. Moving and authentic are other words that come to mind. Mr Tsiolkas is an extremely accomplished writer, if not to everyone’s taste.
Bottom line
It helps to have background historical knowledge of the period, preferably more than the sanitised version I learned at Sunday School.