The Distance Between Us
Masha Hamilton, 2004
Unbridled Books
279 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781932961140
Summary
Caddie Blair, a war correspondent, loses her photojournalist lover and her detachment in one tragic moment during an unexpected ambush in the war-torn Middle East. An authentic look at the emotional and ethical chaos she feels and the consequences when she becomes too involved in the story she is covering.
The Distance Between Us is a straight-ahead story of human passion—desire, conviction, and the guilt of a survivor—struggling for order within the frayed justice of the Middle East conflict. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1957
• Where—N/A
• Education—B.A., Brown University
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York, USA
A journalist who has worked for NBC Mutual Radio, the Los Angeles Times, the Associated Press, and other well-known news organizations, Masha Hamilton is the author of The Distance Between Us, Staircase of a Thousand Steps and The Camel Bookmobile. She lives with her family in New York City in (From the publisher.)
More
Hamilton worked as a foreign correspondent for The Associated Press for five years in the Middle East, where she covered the intefadeh, the peace process and the partial Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon. Then she spent five years in Moscow, where she was a correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, wrote a newspaper column, "Postcard from Moscow," and reported for NBC/Mutual Radio. She wrote about Kremlin politics as well as life for average Russians under Gorbachev and Yeltsin during the coup and collapse of the Soviet Union. She reported from Afghanistan in 2004, and in 2006 she traveled in Kenya to research The Camel Bookmobile and to interview street kids in Nairobi and drought and famine victims in the isolated northeast.
A Brown University graduate, she has been awarded fiction fellowships from Yaddo, Blue Mountain Center, Squaw Valley Community of Writers and the Arizona Commission on the Arts. She teaches for Gotham Writers' Workshop and has also taught at the 92nd Street Y in New York City and at a number of writers' workshops around the country.
She is a licensed shiatsu practitioner and is currently studying nuad phaen boran, Thai traditional massage. She lives with her husband and three children in Brooklyn. (From the author's website.)
Book Reviews
An exciting novel .... we're left thinking about the human tragedy rather than the political scorecard ... [Hamilton's] determined to plumb the conflicted motives of people who rush to see danger in the world or in their newspaper. The result is a powerful portrayal of religious warfare and an unsettling challenge to anyone watching.
The Christian Science Monitor
Masha Hamilton's prose has been described as graceful, luminous, and elegant. I will add beguiling to that list. It seems appropriate that she now teaches at the acclaimed Gotham Writers Workshop. Her past profession as journalist in trouble spots around the world lends credence to this second book The Distance Between Us is believable, the characters multi-faceted, and the plot engaging from first page to last
Catherine "Caddie" Blair is a war correspondent covering Jerusalem. In that part of the world, even the most peaceful inhabitants can be driven to extremes of revenge. Violence is the only common language. While seeking an interview with an Arab extremist, Caddie finds herself in unfamiliar territory, the dusty roads of Lebanon. She's accomanied by co-workers and her lover, Marcus. Marcus is a photo journalist, a skilled creator of moments frozen in time. When bullets are fired at their Land Rover from ambush, all Caddie can remember is the weight of her lover's dying body and his hand pressed to her back in a gesture of protection. In seconds, the man who kept her centered and focused is gone. From that day, Caddie wanders from the barren dry place where Marcus died, to the winding streets of Jerusalem, to Gaza. She's lost her edge. Pieces of herself have been scattered. She seeks renewal, and revenge against whoever fired that fatal bullet in Lebanon.
She quickly takes Alexander Goronsky as her lover. In Goronsky,"darkness lives beneath a tightly controlled exterior." Goronsky sees them as two sides of the same coin. He's a man familiar with the concept of revenge. Their relationship takes Caddie deeper and farther into self-knowledge than her love affair with Marcus ever did. The mysterious Goronsky supports and feeds her journey towards revenge for Marcus' death.
In addition to extremes of passion with Goronsky, she seeks God and gunfire -- that combustible combination ever present in the Middle East. Caddie covers skirmishes as if she were bullet proof and immune to rocks and bottles thrown as weapons, or impervious to the answering explosions of stun grenades, Molotov cocktails and tear gas cannisters. In battle, as in Goronsky's arms, Caddie throws herself into the action searching for some meaningful renewal. Her epiphany, when it comes, is found in one of Marcus' journals. Like Caddie, he had been stripped naked by the wars they've covered, left floundering, living behind a brave facade.
I could endlessly quote passages of glorious prose from this book, but won't. I'll let readers discover Hamilton's gifted way with words for themselves. The author has given us the scents, sights, and sounds of Jerusalem, the sorrows shared by Israeli and Arab cousins. And she's put starkly realistic faces on human weaknesses and strengths. Unbridled Books has picked a winner here.
Laurel Johnson - Midwest Book Review (found on Barnes & Noble.com)
A foreign correspondent's facade of emotional invincibility is shattered by the death of a colleague in journalist Hamilton's sharply etched, emotionally ferocious second novel (after Staircase of a Thousand Steps). Thirty-two-year-old Caddie Blair swears by "measured closeness and a dose of dulled feelings," but everything changes after a stunning ambush on the way to an interview with a Lebanese crime king leaves her lover, news photographer Marcus Lancour, dead in her arms. Caddie retreats to her flat in Jerusalem to make sense of her personal involvement in Marcus's death, refusing to take a cushy desk job in New York and continuing to work both sides of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. A mysterious and alluring Russian professor, Alexander Goronsky, offers insider information about terrorist cell activity, feeding Caddie's need to seek (and witness) revenge. Hamilton's novel is as edgily paced as a thriller, with its jaded crew of international journalists, scenes of horrific violence by Jews and Arabs alike and explosive sex when Goronsky and Caddie come together to forget respective wounds. Hamilton no doubt enlists her own experience as a foreign correspondent to effectively flesh out the characters Caddie encounters, such as Jewish settlers Moshe and his blank wife, Sarah, and the Arab girl, Halima, who wants to bear witness. This is an affecting, viscerally charged work that offers no easy moral answers.
Publishers Weekly
Caddie Blair is a war correspondent in the Middle East whose life is tragically changed in a single second. En route to a high-level interview, she and her lover, Marcus, are caught in an ambush; he catches a bullet and dies beside her. Suddenly, the immunity that Caddie had built up to gunfire, tanks, and corpses evaporates. Faced with survivor's guilt and the loss of her journalistic detachment, Caddie must develop new defense mechanisms to endure the violent world she has called home for years. Enter Goronsky, another victim of terrorism, who holds the deep belief that revenge is the best choice to combat evil. In her second novel (after Staircase of a Thousand Steps), Hamilton, once a foreign correspondent, has crafted a compelling tale of reprisal and endurance with a rich cast of characters. With prose both beguiling and elegant, the story will strike a chord in readers following current events in the Middle East. Recommended for all public libraries. —Christopher J. Korenowsky, Columbus Metropolitan Lib. System, OH.
Library Journal
Hamilton tracks an American journalist in the Middle East. Outside Beirut, on the way to interview a Lebanese crime kingpin with terrorist ties, reporter Caddie Blair survives an ambush that kills British photographer Marcus. Recovering in a dingy hospital, Caddie realizes that she has no one to notify. Marcus was her lover; her grandmother and mother are long dead, and she has few friends in Jerusalem, where she lives. If she ever had a home, it was with Marcus—he'd understood her passion for her work, and she'd admired his: he'd had an uncommon talent for capturing moments that defined the grinding conflict between Israel and the countries that surround it. But his fame was no protection against his fate—and his unknown murderers will go unpunished. Desiring a revenge she can't take, Caddie plunges back into reporting, maintaining a careful distance, yet drawn to scenes of violence as she reflects on Marcus's meaningless death, her parents' long-ago abandonment of her, and her own taste for life on the razor's edge. Fluent in Arabic, she talks to a Palestinian woman seeking treatment for her mortally injured daughter, knowing that the woman's young son built the bomb that burned his little sister to the bone. Before the doctors realize that Caddie is American, she learns the hideous truth: there isn't enough morphine to go around and not enough penicillin. In a restless quest to get a story—any story—she interviews Moshe Bar Lev, a militant settler. A firebomb destroys the bus they're riding, and the settlers retaliate with gunfire, hoping to kill as many Arabs as possible. All in a day's work.... Moshe returns home to dinner with his family and Caddie tags along. There's no peace to be found—though she does find love again with a fellow journalist, himself a survivor of tragic violence. Thoughtfully written but emotionally distant and overly cerebral.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. The essence of this book is in its title. Distance exists in the political landscape of this novel as well as in Caddie's life. What are some of the historical and cultural differences that create distance between the Palestinians and the Jews in this story? How does creating distance influence Caddie's relationship with Marcus? her professional colleagues? her friends? her community? herself?
2. In an instant, Caddie loses the two elements of her life most dear to her: Marcus and her professional detachment. How has reporting about violence in the past affected her?
3. After Marcus's death, Caddie finds herself drawn closer and closer to dangerous situations, putting herself at increasingly greater personal and professional risk, as if she were invincible. What drives this reckless behavior? What other professions encourage similar forms of escape? Does escaping become addictive?
4. What is behind Caddie's strong attraction to Goronsky? From the beginning, he is not honest with her yet she continues to rely on him.
5. Lingering thoughts of revenge plague Caddie. Did you expect this? How do her experiences with Goronsky, Avraham, Halima, and others affect her attitude?
6. The female characters in this novel—including Ya'el, Sarah, Halima, Anya--are diverse women who represent many cultures and values. How does each affect Caddie's actions and influence her decisions?
7. Memories of Marcus's death haunt Caddie. Is she in any way responsible for his death, or is she struggling with her own guilt for surviving the ambush? How does Marcus's journal
8. Sarah tells Caddie, "Two kinds of people find their way to this place. Those who leave, and those who stay." Does Caddie's decision to stay surprise you? Will her personal and professional losses reshape her reporting style?
9. This fictional account of violence in the Middle East parallels many real-life, contemporary scenarios, both at home and abroad (for example, the war in Iraq, September 11, Columbine High School, Kosovo, Sarajevo, and Sudan). What motivates the kind of coverage given to these events? Is the reporting informative or voyeuristic, merely feeding the general public's appetite for violence?
10. This book is dedicated to Kevin Carter, a photojournalist who won a Pulitzer Prize for his disturbing photo of the famine in Sudan. In the picture, a gaunt Sudanese child crouches low to the ground while a vulture lurks nearby. Not long after winning the Pulitzer, Carter took his life. As a strict observer, journalists sometimes may have to let violence and brutality occur because if they become involved, they may change the outcome of the event or the public's understanding of a situation. Are there situations when a journalist should become a participant or is it better to remain an observer?
(Questions from the author's website.)
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