Book: The Complete Maus
Author: Art Spiegelman
Online: Amazon, Bookdepository
ISBN-13: 9780141014081
Maus is not an easy book to review. It was recommended to me by a good friend quite a while ago. Took me a while to get it and now I feel sorry for waiting so long. It’s not an easy book to read, and it’s not an easy book to stop reading.
Maus is a graphic novel about the Holocaust, in which the author is telling two stories in parallel. One is his father’s story about the survival in Auschwitz and the other one is about the complex relationship the author himself has with his father. Oh and, everyone is drawn as an animal: Jews are drawn as mice, Germans are drawn as cats, Poles are drawn as pigs and so on. The description sounds absurd, yet somehow it works..almost too perfectly.
I’ve read plenty of shocking books about WWII, and yet this one hit hard. It is - possibly due to the fact that it’s a comic - the most personal account of the events I’ve ever read. The choice of drawing Jews as mice seemed curious at first, I really didn’t expect that the author could convey a wide range of emotions through the face of a mouse.. But not only did he manage to do that, he succeeded in conveying that which is unspeakable.
For this reason alone, I’d recommend reading the Maus books slowly. Being a comic, you get the urge to read it like you’d read a regular comic, but with Maus, this would be a huge mistake. Spiegelman’s style strikes a gloomy note from the beginning, and it gets so much worse as Vladek’s story becomes a horror above horrors. Maus drawings are very important, one should really take the time to appreciate every single one.
In parallel, you follow the authors meta-story about writing the story and talking to his father. The tension between them oozes from the pages and makes you even more anxious.. Normally, you’d be annoyed and frustrated because of Vladek’s often absurd behaviour, but seeing his story makes it difficult to be either of those things. Once you’ve read it, it is completely unsurprising that the subtitle of the first part is “My Father Bleeds History”.
Without doubt, this is a book which will make you feel angry and sad at the same time, many times. Seeing Vladek sitting on a sofa with a bowed head, surrounded by photographs of people he lost…it almost feels like you’re peering into his soul. Art’s drawings manage to bring Vladek to life in virtually every panel. You can really sense his fear, anger and most of all his sorrow.
This is probably what makes Maus such a good book. Vladek’s survival could be seen as a mere statistical anomaly. After all, he is just one of the few surviving Jews, and plenty of books would probably show his story in that way. Many books talk about the Holocaust in terms of numbers, dates and high level politics and battles. This is a very personal story of Vladek’s - and not only Vladek’s - horrors, struggles, hopes and the few happy moments he had.
Last but not least, many have criticised Art for his choice of animals, feeling that it’s “racist” (showing Poles as pigs and so on). I would have to say that it’s probably a very misguided attempt of political correctness; given the fact that his choice of showing everyone as animals shows the absurdity of nationalism, patriotism, religious exceptionalism or whichever form of tribalism is popular today.
Maus is a book which had to be written, and a book we all wish didn’t exist.
10/10 - Will read many more times, and you should too.