Reviews with content warning for Toxic relationship - The Complete Maus

I found myself having a difficult time with the father son relationship. Both Flawed and traumatized people for obvious reasons. Found myself wishing that the focus was more heavily focused on the fathers retelling of events rather than the fallout from a damaged person raising a child. I supposed illuminating the generational effects of trauma is important, but had a hard time resonating with or feeling much empathy for the son.

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oceanwriter's review

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challenging dark emotional informative reflective sad tense medium-paced

5.0

I didn't realize first going into this that this was a memoir. I guess from the cover I assumed it was a depiction of the Holocaust with a 'cat and mouse' metaphor. I realized as soon as I started reading that this wasn't fiction and it made the analogy all the more powerful.

Comic writer and illustrator Art Spiegel tells his father's WWII survival story in a series of two books (combined into one edition in this printing). Though not illustrations of humans, the imagery of the concentration camps (and what Jewish people went through in general) is as grim as you'd expect them to be. This isn't a watered-down narration that tried to spare the reader from the horrors. It's a raw and honest account.

The book is told brilliantly going back and forth between Art's conversations with his father as he relayed his story to that story unfolding on the pages. There are some abrupt starts and finished here and there, but it added to the tone of the book. There is still so much we don't know about what happened during the Holocaust that we may never learn.

In addition to being a book about the Holocaust (namely in Poland), it's also a book about the relationship between a father and son. Intergenerational trauma is a fascinating psychological phenomenon. This has often been seen among children with parents who have had traumatic experiences before their children were born. This along with the natural generational gap between parents and children makes up a lot of the subtext in Art and Vladek's story.

Perhaps it's needless to say that this book is going to stay with me for a long time. It's right up there with The Diary of a Young Girl and The Boy on the Wooden Box. The stories of these victims must be kept alive.

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sknappy1's review

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challenging dark emotional informative sad medium-paced

5.0

A very difficult, but very powerful read. The artist details his father's experiences as a Holocaust survivor, as told directly by his father. What I appreciate it about this was the breadth that was covered. While Anne Frank's experience focuses on hiding, and Elie Wiesel's focuses on the concentration camps, this this book covers a broader range of everything. You see and experience the gradual buildup of everything from the beginning before the problems started and then how everything got progressively worse. You see how Vladek experienced losing his successful business, to having to hide, to being in the ghetto, all the scheming required to get by, to being in a concentration camp, what happened after they got out of the camp, etc. You also learn about so many other people's experiences based on his descriptions of what happened to people that he knew. This book really made cry a few times, so go in prepared. It starts off pretty easy, but later on there are some real gut-wrenching moments, but that's the reality of how it was. I also appreciate how the author details the difficult relationship he has with his father.

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