The Complete Maus: A Survivor's Tale

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Average customer rating 4.3 (3 comments)

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I would most certainly rate this book a five star, however, as a first generation American of Polish ancestry, I found it a bit to swallow in the case where the Poles were depicted as "pigs." I'm sure my grandfather didn't enjoy being on his knees with a gun to his head when the Nazi's came and burned their farm down and hauled them to a camp, his life was only spared because my aunt begged the soldier not to, and the soldier in charge must have had a shred of compassion, because he called the execution off. My family hid many Jews, and I am not prejudice, but a story that has been corroborated by others in my family, and friends of theirs passed an incident down to me, it goes, " (we) were hiding a Jewish family in our home, one of many, on one occasion the soldiers were coming and the border told my grandfather, " if you tell them we are here I will tell them your wife is a Jew! My grandfather never told on them, however, they told them to leave when the soldiers left. I later came to find out later in life when they burned the farm down that it was the Naboloki Massacre, and my grandfather was targeted because there was a rumor that he and the town priest were hiding valuable church relics in the fields and they (the Germans) wanted it and my grandfather wouldn't tell them where they were. They later found out that prior to their visit, the soldiers had hung the priest in the church and burned it down around him. My point, not ALL poles were pigs.

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Brilliant. I could not stop thinking about this book while--and after--reading it. One of those reminders of how hard it is to laugh, cry, and struggle to keep reading all at the same time.

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Art Spiegelman's 'Maus' is a rare commidity in the world of comic books. It tells the story of the writer/artist's father, Vladek Spiegelman, who was a holocaust and Auschwitz survivor during WW2, in the form of a biopic, and how the effects of those days long gone resonated with the resulting generation that continued to live. As an honest portrayal of people/human beings, the book is without parallel. Taking a leaf of its storytelling technique from George Orwell's classic 'Animal Farm', the characters are represented by animal/rodent equivalents. The Polish Jews are Mice (hence the title of the book), the Nazi's Cats, the American's Dogs and so on. The use of this method allows the book to not just show us easy visual distinction (this is a comic book afterall), but also make a metaphor out of these representations (Cats hunt Mice, Dogs chase Cats etc) about the nature of survival in an unjust, unbalanced world. Spiegelman's choice of including even those portions of the auto biographical story where he visits his father at his home in New York to talk to him and convince him to tell his story is, in a word, brilliant. Such a technique would be hard to accomplish in a conventional book with only text, without having to break away from the story being told to inform readers of the change in setting, but here it works just right. Also commendable is the honesty with which the book is written; none of the fathers broken, imperfect East European English is doctored to sound correct - it is conveyed in its preserved original manner, therefore statements such as "Better to spend your time making drawings, what will bring you some money" are found often, sometimes to amusing effect. The two volume books together offer a terrific, unputdownable read, that is fluid and without complications. They are not without their flaws though - Volume 2, the self righteously titled "And here my troubles began" is indulgent and self aware. It tarnishes the harsh tone of the fathers staggering survival tale and mellows it out with a story arc about the son (Art) coping up with a father (and hence family life) that he never understood but which he was affected by. Visits to therapists, coming to terms with his mothers suicide after they moved to New York etc offer an alternative to the story we wish we would rather not have read, for in the face of tale of human suffering and determination, this warrants little interest. Despite this minor setback late in the tale, the overall book is a unique amalgam of the visual power of comic books and the simplistic abilities of the written word. A graphic novel worthy of its universal praise and a watershed in the world of realistic non-superhero comic books.