Maus

I finished a great book this evening. I thought it was good enough to share. Sorry to those of you for whom this is duplicate reading.

This evening I finished Maus. It only took me a couple of evenings after I settled down to give it some real time. As you may have seen on the Palimplists, I have given it a five star rating. So first off, thanks Bak for recommending. I never would have picked it up otherwise and I'm so glad i did.

For those of you who don't know what it's about let me briefly explain. Maus is a graphic novel. The author/ illustrator is recording his father's memories from his time before WWII, through his experiences as a Jew in concentration camps and into his days after the war as a holocaust survivor. The Jews are represented as mice, the Germans as cats, the Poles as pigs and the Americans as Dogs. These creaturely faces sometimes become masks when a Jew pretends to be a Pole to avoid detection and also, rather poignantly, when the illustrator depicts himself with a mouse mask over his own face as he tries to record his father's experiences as a 'second generation Jew.' The book is rich with imagery.

I think the book works so well because it is not simply a chronicle of the war. Spiegelman looks at the effects of the holocaust on his father after the end of the war - the difficulty he has in adjusting to normal life, the problems in his second marriage, the expectations he has of his son.

He doesn't shy away from depicting what was obviously a tense relationship with his father whilst still sensitively portraying the pain of an Aushwitz survivor. There is a mix of responsibility to the truth of his father's pain and experiences coupled with the reality of a relationship fraught with disagreements and ill-founded expectations.

He also conveys some sense of the awkwardness of trying to find the truth about something at once very immediate and entirely removed from ones own experience. Within the text he wonders if his father feels guilty about surviving and he questions his own feelings of not being good enough for his father. He depicts his own struggle to find out about what is essentially a personal history that he hasn't experienced for himself.

There is so much I could say about this book. It is a book with convincing psychological depth.It's not an easy read nor is it relentlessly harsh. The narrative dips between the war and later life so that the storyline is about Art recording what happened to his father rather than as a documentary of suffering. I would strongly recommend it for anyone to read.