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Beaufort | 
 enlarge | Author: Ron Leshem
Creator: Evan Fallenberg
Publisher: Delacorte Press
Category: Book
List Price: $24.00
Buy New: $6.20
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Avg. Customer Rating:  11 reviews
Sales Rank: 145463
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 368
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.9 x 1.3
ISBN: 0553806823
Dewey Decimal Number: 892.436
EAN: 9780553806823
ASIN: 0553806823
Publication Date: December 26, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: brand new, 2007, hc
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Product Description
By turns subversive and darkly comic, brutal and tender, Ron Leshem’s debut novel is an international literary sensation, winner of Israel’s top award for literature and the basis for a prizewinning film. Charged with brilliance and daring, hypnotic in its intensity, Beaufort is at once a searing coming-of-age story and a novel for our times—one of the most powerful, visceral portraits of the horror, camaraderie, and absurdity of war in modern fiction.
Beaufort. To the handful of Israeli soldiers occupying the ancient crusader fortress, it is a little slice of hell—a forbidding, fear-soaked enclave perched atop two acres of land in southern Lebanon, surrounded by an enemy they cannot see. And to the thirteen young men in his command, Twenty-one-year-old Lieutenant Liraz “Erez” Liberti is a taskmaster, confessor, and the only hope in the face of attacks that come out of nowhere and missions seemingly designed to get them all killed.
All around them, tension crackles in the air. Long stretches of boredom and black humor are punctuated by flashes of terror. And the threat of death is constant. But in their stony haven, Erez and his soldiers have created their own little world, their own rules, their own language. And here Erez listens to his men build castles out of words, telling stories, telling lies, talking incessantly of women, sex, and dead comrades. Until, in the final days of the occupation, Erez and his squad of fed-up, pissed-off, frightened young soldiers are given one last order: a mission that will shatter all remaining illusions—and stand as a testament to the universal, gut-wrenching futility of war.
The basis for the Academy Award-nominated film of the same name.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 6 more reviews...
 Are we not men . . . September 27, 2008
This is the best novel I've read about men in war since Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried". In a flood of language (translated effectively from Hebrew to English) we are swept into a world of words describing experiences that have no counterpart in everyday life. The young IDF soldiers stationed inside Lebanon during the 1980s and 90s occupation of that country, led by a nonstop talking narrator, fill the boredom of their lives and block out the terror of their perilous position as a target of Hezbollah artillery by talking, talking, talking, mostly in an argot of their own invention.
The talk is often raunchy, outrageous and absurd, marked with playful gallows humor, while the CO of the squad is constantly concerned with whatever persuasive powers are needed to maintain both discipline and morale, in the face of often incomprehensible military orders and a growing media-covered revolt among civilians at home against the government's defense policies. These, we discover, are the months, weeks, and days before a final pull-out, as one by one, lives are still being lost.
There is little actual engagement with the enemy, just a hanging on until an end that seems never to come. Meanwhile, the soldiers in the unit struggle to understand what the experience is doing to them as young men on the sudden sharp edge of adulthood. This is a powerful book, neither pro-war nor anti-war, though it will surely disturb those who are strongly one or the other. Regardless of how you view the Isreali government's policies, you will not soon forget this book - if it's even possible.
Beaufort review September 2, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Beaufort is the first novel of its kind that so intimately and so accurately portrays the experience of the average Israeli teenager serving in Lebanon in one of the world's most intense armies. Leshem captures readers with his bold and straightforward language, not holding anything back and expressing feeling and emotion in a mindset that most people aren't accustomed to. Leshem really brings the reader in to the world of Beaufort with his chilling details of surrounding and emotion, loss and love, life and death, and the stark difference between the life across the border, and the life inside Israel.
 Generation Kill - Israeli Style August 25, 2008
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile, "
--- "Henry V", Shakespeare
Beaufort" offers a gripping fictional account of an Israeli defense force manning a desolate outpost in southern Lebanon. Instead of a GWOT, you have a local war on terror and Hezbollah. Ron Leshem creates a fully believable world of full metal jacket, so realistic you can almost smell the cordite, sweat and blood. The mental stress of fighting "the new war" that rarely offers open pitched battles is drawn brilliantly.
"Beaufort" underscores the challenges of any occupation force as it struggles to impose its will on foreign territory - a timely lesson that of course transcends southern Lebanon. The tedium and terror that comprises the soldier's life is depicted in a fully believable way.
"Beaufort" launches a full armed assault on your senses as it takes you into a world characterized by days of boredom and minutes of firefight terror. A gripping combat novel!
Israel's Catch-22 August 13, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Israel is the embodiment of a Catch-22 - do one thing, you get demonized, do something else, and you get pounded. And the innocent bystanders often caught in the middle are its soldiers.
Maybe you laugh - innocent bystanders, soldiers, same sentence - but when you're talking about a citizen army, then two go hand-in-hand pretty well.
The book, about soldier stationed at Beaufort, technically within the "buffer zone" created in Lebanon following the invasion in the 80s, is a great read. Everything takes place within Beaufort, and so the lack of movement and changing setting means that you actually get to invest in the cast of characters.
Each one of them sticks out in your mind. Leshem does a great job at making each of them matter to you, so that when something goes wrong, it's not just the death of some guy whose name you already forgot. I was surprised, the way I started remembering their names even though there seemed to be so many of them. I started to expect the types of jokes one of them told, the cheesy geekiness of another. They're all just boys hoping to make it back home alive.
I also appreciate the way the book dealt with a highly-politicized topic. It wasn't about whether the pull-out was right or wrong (although in hindsight perhaps we have more information to inform that opinion), but only what each of the soldiers had to say about it. I can't imagine what it must be like to sit within enemy territory and be told that you can't attack anyone because of the complexity of the situation, because of the impending removal of forces. So you have to stay put, try not to get killed, and hope that they get you out of these as soon as possible. Guys that just wanted the chance to do something to defend their homes got stuck being sitting ducks, waiting through each day with no sense of when it might all end or why they weren't being allowed to do their jobs.
This book made me feel connected to the land and its people so that I started to understand Israeli nuance a little better than I did before. So much of it is about that nuance, that unstated apprehension and frustration that underlines the boundless machismo and joy you often get to see with them.
Highly recommended.
An invisible line between historical fiction/nonfiction August 1, 2008
Leshem creates a powerful story of an Israeli soldier's life at Beaufort in Southern Lebanon in 98- 00. Its an intense story, following a young commander in the army as he tries to keep his troops sane and alive while fighting for Israel's retention of land in the southern part of its northern neighbor. What emerges is this juxtaposition of a seriously unsettled political and military matter with the life of many young "kids" (as leshem refers to the soldiers). Its hard to imagine that this is how life is for these soliders, but as we know this is how life is. Many of the soldiers in the story are "wasted" and you see how the soldiers learn to cope or at best learn to try.
This book received a lot of praise when it first was published in Israel in 2006 (under the title "If Heavens Exist") and was popularized when read by many soldiers who were fighting in the 2nd israeli-hezbollah conflict. Somewhat of a foreshadowing of the dangers of hezbollah gaining strength and returning an attack, this book must have hit home for the soldiers who read it in 2006 and their families; especially those who lost a son or daughter in battle.
The English translation is okay. At times it feels a little choppy but that's an innate problem with translating from one language to another.
I feel that for anybody who is interested in Israeli culture, this book is a powerful exploration into what it means to be an Israeli soldier in recent years (especially compared to the soldier of the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s and even 80s).
Definitely recommend reading. Perhaps get the hebrew version if you can read hebrew.
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