christos tsiolkas damascus reviews
It is a deliberate and deeply considered decision to present the terrible barbarism of the world comparable to and perhaps even influenced by that hardest to confront cinematic masterpiece, Pasolini’s Salo or the 120 Days of Sodom. The paganism of Damascus exhibits the all but absolute cruelty of a paganism that flaunts its sadism. 1 Cor: 13), but also made homophobic observations which have informed homophobic modes of Christianity (e.g. Certainly, the gay gene of Christianity is given its due. This is a novel that mourns what the world might have been, had bickering Christians back then agreed on a kinder version of Christ’s message. And can it be seen in the contemporary world. An outcast because of his background, and because his sexuality doesn’t allow him a family, Paul chases after heretics. Read more about Guardian Australia’s Unmissable books of 2019. The … Though it comes nowhere close to the depth of narrative and insight of Kazantzakis or Norman Mailer invigorating novels in the ‘Jesus Genre’. I’d had enough. I thought the concept was clever, but I hated the characters, who seemed vulgar and grasping and driven by startlingly forceful sexual appetites. More a series of vignettes, some treating facets of Paul and another three entitled Faith, Hope, and Love. It shocks because Christos Tsiolkas seasons his narrative with numerous expletives and obscenities. Two thousand years of history are in that moment. Eventually, she finds her way to Paul and the comfort of Christ but only after the narrative has crawled over the crushed bones of desecrated children. Like Emmanuel Carrère’s recent nonfiction work The Kingdom, Damascus is primarily an attempt to understand the character of Saint Paul, the pious Jew and persecutor of Christians who, after an alleged encounter with the risen Christ on the road to Damascus, made it his life’s mission to spread Jesus’s teachings throughout the Roman empire. Also the academics Tsolkias’ consults are atheists of varying degrees. The story of his conversion is not, actually, at the centre of this book. However, I use the word ‘historical’ very loosely. I'm very grateful for having read it. The focus is a trinity of men - Paul, Timothy and Thomas - 3 men, not saints, learning, ageing, battling doubt, loss and persecution as they wait for the return of their Saviour. Damascus would I think be better enjoyed if the reader has some historical contextual background. 4.5, rounded down because CT includes three pages of the ‘ramble without a full stop to show some kind of fervour’ literary trope that I HATE. I needed breaks to regroup myself to continue. From a very unlikely subject, this is a stunning, thought provoking, compelling read. It’s a worthy effort and an easy read. Why is the promise unfulfilled,” asks Able and points to the fornicators in the crowd. This was hard to read in that it was brutal and raw. Christos Tsiolkas offers a dark vision of the origins of Christianity.Credit:Eddie Jim. I was reminded at times of The Name of the Rose (which I liked) but not even close to being in the same league. And the whole logic and ambit of Damascus is like this. Allen and Unwin. For a moment we think we know where we’re going and that Tsiolkas’ Paul will be seen through the dark glass of the thorn of the flesh he speaks of in his epistles. An interesting explanation is offered for the development of early Christianity, but you need a strong constitution to cope with the violence and gore. by Allen & Unwin. Tsiolkas in the author’s note states that he worked on the novel Damascus for five years. Christos Tsiolkas has said that a central preoccupation in his work is “How can you be a good person in this world?” Up to now the world in question has generally been modern Australia — most famously in his global bestseller The Slap, where the fallout from a parent hitting someone else’s child at a barbecue reveals the cruelties, blind spots and tribal divisions at work among the middle classes of Melbourne. Christos Tsiolkas is the author of five novels: “Over the years Saul has heard of Yeshua's teaching and they never made any sense to him: sometimes he had preached as a devout Jew, but at others spoke as an apostate. Damascus is a Greek Orthodox apostate’s admirably serious-minded effort to fathom the origins of a morality that, Tsiolkas admits in an afterword, still offers him solace and guidance, while hinting at what Jesus’s teachings might have become. Another of Tsiolkas’s acts of fictive licence is to suppose that Jesus had a twin: “doubting” Thomas, author of the apocryphal gospel discovered at Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1945. Factions splinter, enmities deepen and their leaders grow desperate. Tsiolkas talks of grappling with Paul first at high school in Melbourne and being repelled at the time by his attacks on homosexuals. A novel about St Paul by Christos Tsiolkas? St Paul, of course, is quite a customer. He leaves Thomas behind in Jerusalem. I’d had enough. They make sense of his work. • Rob Doyle’s Threshold is published by Bloomsbury. ISBN: 9781760875091. However, I use the word ‘historical’ very loosely. Was he preaching mercy or revolution? Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read. Tsiolkas in the author’s note states that he worked on the novel Damascus for five years. And Tsiolkas does the fullest possible justice to the brutalism of a world full of ghastly hates, of mutilations and drek, of atrocity and carnage, and sadism so rampant it is like the gaping mouth of hell. 32 New Historical Fiction Novels Readers Are Raving About. My understand of Saul of Tarsus is that he gave the world the twisted view of faith as we now know it. Infanticide, lust, prostitution and immorality are involved – and that all before page 28. To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Beyond the cruelty and squalor he evokes so vividly, beyond hate and ignorance, there is the prospect of kindness and goodness. Dare I say is a bit like going to a Turkish historian to get the facts on Greek history. Rom 1:26-27 and 1 Cor 6:9) For Tsiolkas, a gay man, the dichotomies in the writing of Paul are painful, but also intriguing. To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. I was completely absorbed by a novel exploring the lost possibilities of a faith I abandoned a long time ago. So are the pagan cults of the time. But what saves the enterprise is how absolutely seriously he takes the bizarre preoccupations of this time. To my surprise, I was completely absorbed by a novel exploring the lost possibilities of a faith I abandoned a long time ago. The book goes back and forth in time, between scenes from the life of St Paul and. The … Need another excuse to treat yourself to a new book this week? His conversion on the road to the Syrian capital is rather pathetic. Now he ups the stakes considerably by exploring the far greater cruelties, blind spots and tribal divisions at work during nothing less than the birth of the Christian church and, with it, of Christian morality. By this time Paul had disappeared to Rome, still powered by the pursuit of purity, his last doubts packed away, convinced it’s all been worth the sacrifices, certain that faith alone will sustain his mission in the world. Christos Tsiolkas reimagines Paul of Tarsus as a repressed homosexual with a penchant for violence and a nearly unbearable yearning to fit in. Did he come to Earth to save mankind or punish sinners? “Why has Jesus the Saviour not returned? Never before have I been granted a look into the real lives of those people living through the biblical period of Jesus. This book contextualises the first 4 generations of what is today known as the Christian Church - not yet a rich, powerful and conservative force in the world, it is a small heretical, weird ‘death loving’ sect already developing internal schisms. It’s a worthy effort and an easy read. But Tsiolkas does not dramatise any such syncretist hippiedom: his twin of Jesus is more the bluff voice of agnosticism that has to co-exist with any intimation of divinity, qualifying it and ultimately annihilating it. I painfully got up to page 285. Please, The subscription details associated with this account need to be updated. His latest novel Damascus (Allen and Unwin 2019) is on many levels a triumph of literary achievement: a re-imagined, epic and powerful retelling of the events surrounding the establishment of the Christian church. Just a moment while we sign you in to your Goodreads account. It is a hellish book full of poignant glimpses through a dark mirror – horrifying, disheartening and often rawly written. So many of its leaders failed to fulfill the absolute obligation of men to marry and father sons. Hollywood has done such damage here. P, Gosh, whoever would have guessed? How does a writer avoid the cadence of the King James Bible without falling for the banalities of Ben-Hur? 6 reviews . 12 Jun 2020. Lots to think about with this excellent novel. Thomas, Timothy and the ‘miserably homosexual’ Paul are rendered real in Tsiolkas’s new book. Christos Tsiolkas reimagines Paul of Tarsus as a repressed homosexual with a penchant for violence and a nearly unbearable yearning to fit in. I don’t deserve to.”. He had some learning but no understanding, and he did not keep faith with the Lord's sacred words. He has not come because we are not worthy!”. To the end he is tormented by “lusts and desires and shames that cannot be spoken”. Not at all. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of, Published We hardly see it happening. Was this man king of kings? How could he not be a novelist’s hero?
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