Waltz with Bashir

After much delay, just finished, "Waltz with Bashir".

First. A brilliant graphic novel. So personal. Filled with pungent war memories. And the futility of a war. Ari Folman and David Polonsky, take you down their memory lanes. 

To me, the brilliance of the novel, is in the fact that it does not try hard to impress upon the reader the nuances of the Lebanon'82 war,  and its aftermath. It does not try to tell you something new or choke you with details about the Sabra and Shatila mascare , the facts are all out there. Neither is the book about  the rise and fall of Bachir Gemayel ('Bashir'). It is Ari's personal story from the war front-lines. And it is how he saw the war. As an ordinary soldier. Not as a general. Not as a war hero. But one, who was just there, with actually no real reasons to be there.

We were kind of unaware of a lot that was going on. ... it was like a bad Acid Trip.

But yet, it is a very gripping account of what actually happened. The story challenges you to see the war as it happened through young Ari's eyes, who seems to float around, little lost.{almost reminded me of the insomnia induced, time stopping stints of Ben Willis in Cashback}. David's images brilliantly capture the various artifacts in locked away in Ari's memories, and stitch them together in near perfect chronological order.There is no single strong character. A lot of the reconstruction of the war, is done after excavating the scathed memories of his fellow soldiers.

But there is a single strong underlying message: War is terrible.  

By the end, David's images leave you feeling slightly overwhelmed.Because they seem so real, they are highly evocative. And the message, jumps at you from the very last page page of the book in a very unexpectedly, graphic fashion.

Historically ignorant that I am, the book sent me scrounging around the web, looking for all the details. After reading a dozen wiki links, and plethora of other websites, I was slightly better at connecting all the dots. Now, I feel an even stronger connect with the books take on the futility and the damaging aftermaths of a war. Any war.


* I also feel the book maybe a little too kind on Israel's alignment with the Christian militia. It is decidedly ambiguous and mild about Israel's participation in order to maintain the theme of neutrality and the main focus for the book/movie.

Cover of Persepolis

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Yes, there is a movie as well, with an excellent accompanying OST.
I also recommend,  Persepolis. A brilliant animated autobiographical account of a young Iranian woman, Marjane Satrapi, during the years Iran was going through a Islamic Metamorphosis.
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Google Search, recommends that I next read: Art Spiegelman's Maus.