Exit Wounds

As long as we were reading Jobnik! this week I decided to finally crack open Exit Wounds (by Rutu Modan), another graphic novel about life in Israel (presumably set in the past decade as well) that deals with violence on the fringes of the story but isn't 100% consumed by it.

I'm going to copy and paste the description from wikipedia because it's a good description without a whole mess of spoilers:
"Modan's first full length graphic novel tells the story of Koby Franco, a 20-something cab driver working in Tel Aviv. Franco's mundane everyday life is interrupted when a female soldier approaches him, claiming his estranged father was killed by a suicide bomber at a train station. He and the young woman begin searching for clues to see if Franco's father, whom the soldier was romantically involved with, is dead or alive."

There are some very interesting themes this work shares with Jobnik!  Both stories are concerned with how personal life moves within/in spite of a potentially violent and tense atmosphere.  One would expect that a story about a girl in the IDF during the second intifada would be much more of stereotypical action-packed war story, but it's not.  Exit Wounds throws the same curve ball.  The story is based around a missing father who may or may not have been killed in a suicide bombing, but the story isn't about suicide bombings, the conflict, death, and destruction.  It stays fairly well focused on the interactions of the main character and his family and the female lead Numi.

Exit Wounds also touches on women as members of the IDF.  Numi often discusses how she fits in with other women the expectations of femininity she feels she's not living up to.  Numi feels out of place in her own country in some regards and it reminded me a bit of the feelings expressed by Miriam.

What I found most interesting about reading Jobnik! and Exit Wounds back-to-back was how conflict and stress was just part of the background of the stories.  It says something interesting about the experience of an Israeli or even long-term residents.  The conflict can be overwhelming at times, reach out and affect someone personally, but it's still part of the background.  After so many years in conflict it's almost become part of the day to day noise.