Book Review – Waltz With Bashir
March 3rd, 2009 by SocProf and tagged Book Reviews, Mass Violence, Movies
While waiting for the movie to be shown around here, I had to satisfy myself with the book. I read it all this evening and could not put it down and it is a haunting book. I know nothing of graphic illustration (as I mentioned before when I reviewed Hereville) but here, the illustrations create a clear contrast between the war in Lebanon in the 1980s and the contemporary period in which the narrator tries to recapture the lost memories of the massacres of the Palestinian camps of Sabra and Chatila, committed by Christian phalangists with the passive (or maybe not so passive… Ariel Sharon bears a great deal of responsibility for that one) complicity of the Israeli army.
And as the memories of the war come back through the stories told by other former soldiers who served in Lebanon, we see the banal and sometimes absurd atrocities of war and the logical consequences of the mixing of religion and politics. Unleashing the dogs of war may be easy (and it often is for those making these political decisions because the political pay-offs are there right away), but for those who have to deal with the personal consequences of these conflicts, it’s not a Pandora’s box easy to close (can I weave metaphors or what?).
And while the illustrations and story are powerful, there is nothing to prepare the reader for the shock of the last two pages of the book.
So why did this movie not win an Oscar?
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