Revenge seems more like a strange portrait of a woman low in self-esteem, and desperate for reassurance than an exploration of the title. Rosita Boland meets the book's author, Laura Blumenfeld.
Revenge is a heavy word, loaded with portent. Used as part of a book title, it makes a strong statement, and naturally invites the question, revenge for what? Washington Post journalist Laura Blumenfeld has called her first book Revenge: A Story of Hope: a combination of memoir and factual reporting.
In 1986, Laura Blumenfeld's father, David Blumenfeld, visiting from New York, was one of several tourists shot at random in Jerusalem by a faction of the PLO. The bullet fired by Omar Khatib skidded along his scalp, leaving a scar but nothing worse: a fraction lower and the story would have been very different. Blumenfeld made a swift and perfect recovery - inasmuch as a person ever fully recovers from the knowledge that their murder was intended.
The revenge which is the subject of his daughter's book is for that attempted murder. Over a decade later, Blumenfeld spent the first year of her marriage based in Jerusalem tracking down the family of the man - then in jail - who had fired at her father. This led to an exchange of letters between herself and Khatib, who is referred to throughout as "the shooter", culminating in her histrionic appearance at his trial, when she insisted on standing up and telling the courtroom who she was. Blumenfeld also interviewed a number of people in Middle Eastern and European countries, exploring how culture and religion can influence vengeance, and these stories are woven into the larger narrative.
Given that her father did not die, nor was he permanently injured in the attempt on his life, the obvious devil's advocate question is: why write this book? "The inconsequence of my father's injury allowed me to pursue it," Blumenfeld replies. "If he had been killed, I would have been broken, and the book would never have been written. My father being shot shook my world at a time when I was just stepping out in the world and going to college. Revenge is always about small things," she says.
What has she learned about revenge since writing her book? "Revenge is a darkness in ourselves we deny. When we are hurt, there are only two choices. You can have an eye for an eye or you can turn the other cheek. I didn't find either response satisfying or realistic. There is a third way: transformation. Revenge doesn't need to be about destroying the enemy, but about transforming them."
It's a curiously old-fashioned, colonial way of thinking, with a whiff of the crusading missionary about it. In fact, several of Blumenfeld's observations come across as surprisingly naive. In the book, she writes portentously: "The shooting was my first brush with evil in the world - somebody had tried to murder my father. I was born to American parents who believed the world was good, who raised us in exquisite illusion."
Revenge: A Story of Hope, is an uneasy read, screaming out for an editor's pencil. Huge chunks of this book should have been cut. Blumenfeld's nose is pressed so closely to the glass of her topic that she often loses her sense of perspective, mistaking the subjective for the objective. In common with the ever-more depressing trend of confessional-type American "faction", Blumenfeld drags the most personal and humiliating details of her marriage that year into the book; details which cast no light at all upon her purported subject, and which only result in trivialising the bigger picture.
Does the reader really need to know, for instance, that for three months of their honeymoon year her husband kept a record of their relationship in his notebook, marking in it every time he felt their marriage was "intolerable and insufferable". (One day out of four, for the record.)
"I've never written about myself before," Blumenfeld admits. "They were the most difficult bits of writing in the book - not looking at things from the outside. I'm happiest when learning about other people."
Worse by far however is where journalistic ethics appear to cross the line into very grey areas. Blumenfeld uses her press contacts to gain access to "the shooter's" family, visiting them over a period of a year, and telling them she is writing a book about revenge. She omits, however, to tell them she is the daughter of the man their son and brother tried to kill. In time, she begins to write letters to Khatib in prison, fishing for any clues of remorse he may have. Several of these letters, and their replies, are included in the book.
"Dear Omar, Another amazing letter from you, thank you . . . I love what you said about imagining you are somewhere else. I do that too. When I feel sad, I think back to my childhood home and remember sitting with my best friend on our front steps, watching the rain feeling safe and loved . . ."
He addresses her as "Dear friend Laura" and talks of prison life. In one of her last letters to him, she writes: "I was always glad that you wrote 'Dear friend Laura' even if it was based on an illusion. Is it true, that we are friends?" They had never met when she wrote this. Reading these letters, and the intimacies contained therein, it is impossible not to think of those women who inexplicably write letters to murderers, convincing themselves they are in love with them.
On another occasion, she brings home a gift of chocolate cream-filled wafers which the accomplice of "the shooter", and mastermind of the attack on her father, had given to her. She puts them on the table silently and her unsuspecting father, visiting from the US, eats four. This is a weird and grim little passage, illustrating clearly how obessional with her subject she seems to have become at that point.
There are several photographs of Khatib and his relatives in the book, and his family are as much a part of the narrative as her own family. There are in-depth discussions of his politics and the background to the day when he shot at her father. The fact that it is Khatib who ended up as the subject of a book, rather than many other faction-fighters, is like looking at an old class photograph of smiling children, where only a ring around one head indicates that that person later became news. Like it or not, Blumenfeld's book has plucked Khatib from faction-fighter obscurity; and has focused an enormous amount of attention and free publicity on a certain cause.
"It's a book that's meant to raise more questions than it answers," she says, clearly uncomfortable with the question. The book lies before us on the table. She picks it up and leafs through it, points to a paragraph. "There," she says, "that's the most important bit in the whole book." The lines are from a letter Khatib wrote to her father, after he had discovered who Laura was. "God is so good to me that he gets me know your Laura who made me feel the true meaning of love and forgiveness. She was the mirror that made me see your face as a human person who deserved to be admired and respected."
"You see, he transformed," she says.
The entire book is not so much about revenge as about the very strange and queasy portrait of a woman low in self-esteem, and desperate for reassurance. Blumenfeld asks me three times if I like her book and once if I would want to recommend it to my friends. Well, I wouldn't pack it for beach reading, put it that way.
Revenge: A Story of Hope by Laura Blumenfeld is published by Picador (£10.99 sterling)