The Complete Maus
Children of Holocaust survivors
2003
296
Maus tells the story of Vladek Spiegelman, a Jewish survivor of Hitler’s Europe, and his son, a cartoonist coming to terms with his father’s story. Maus approaches the unspeakable through the diminutive. Its form, the cartoon (the Nazis are cats, the Jews mice), shocks us out of any lingering sense of familiarity and succeeds in ‘drawing us closer to the bleak heart of the Holocaust’ (The New York Times).Maus is a haunting tale within a tale. Vladek’s harrowing story of survival is woven into the author’s account of his tortured relationship with his aging father. Against the backdrop of guilt brought by survival, they stage a normal life of small arguments and unhappy visits. This astonishing retelling of our century’s grisliest news is a story of survival, not only of Vladek but of the children who survive even the survivors. Maus studies the bloody pawprints of history and tracks its meaning for all of us.This combined, definitive edition includes Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale and Maus II.
‘The most affecting and successful narrative ever done about the Holocaust’
– Wall Street Journal
‘The first masterpiece in comic book history’
-The New Yorker
My first graphic novel and what a wonderful book to read!
Spiegelman does a great job of recounting his fathers story of the holocaust. The broken English of Vladek and the interspersion of his miserly acts in between the telling of the horrors of holocaust sort of balances the narrative and makes you want to read this book till the end. But for it, I am sure, people would not have read the book in it’s entirety.
Through the book, I kept wondering if the resourcefulness of Vladek may have helped him survive the camps. But at the same time Anja and Mala too survived the Auschwitz and somewhere you couldn’t help but wonder the truth of – “…But it wasn’t the best people who survived, nor did the best ones die. It was random!”
My Rating: 5/5
