Reviews tagging 'Vomit'

Maus: A Survivor's Tale. My Father Bleeds History by Art Spiegelman

2 reviews

cstein's review

challenging dark emotional funny informative lighthearted reflective sad fast-paced

4.25

Spiegelman's decision to draw rather than merely write this memoir importantly limits the reader's imagination, leaving drastically less room for confusion, wrong interpretation, or willful ignorance of the facts of his and his father's experiences. In a similarly ingenious way, Spiegelman's cartoon animal characters provide sufficient whimsy and distance from the horrors of the Holocaust to make the work readable, while also prompting frequent pauses to reflect on how the emotions and horrors experienced by these cartoon animals are actually those experienced by very much non-cartoon people. Phew.

As the Newsweek review of this work reads, in part, "Maus compels us to bear witness in a different way: the very artificiality of its surface makes it possible to imagine the reality beneath." 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Death of parent, Antisemitism, Death, Confinement, Animal cruelty, Animal death, Suicide, Child death, and Murder

Moderate: Violence, Blood, Chronic illness, Deportation, Genocide, Cursing, Forced institutionalization, Gore, Grief, Gun violence, Hate crime, Mental illness, and Physical abuse

Minor: Racial slurs, Racism, War, Vomit, and Excrement

marissasa's review against another edition

challenging dark emotional informative reflective sad tense fast-paced

5.0

This graphic novel is hard-hitting, emotional, and complex in every way. The Holocaust is always a hard topic to read about, and yet the comic format with Jewish people represented as mice, Polish people as pigs, and German people as cats presents a true narrative of a Jewish family's survival in a way that makes the atrocities they faced seem just as horrific as they were, but somehow also more digestible and readable. I very much admire Art Spiegelman's artistic choice to include imagery of himself at the present time of interviewing his father and the discussions they had about the experiences he would eventually turn into a comic, making the comic meta while also giving a chance to see what his father was like in the present in comparison to how he was in the past while living through life in Poland. The art itself is haunting but brilliantly done, filled with details and expressions of fear, surprise, grief, and more that you wouldn't expect to come across as emotional as they do when depicted on mice. I was interested in reading this book ever since I heard it made its way onto banned books list in America, and I am glad I read it because I now know how important a piece of work like this is in preserving history and personal accounts of the Holocaust, and how its uniqueness in presentation allowed discussions around the crimes of Nazi Germany to be more easily accessible and held especially among children just learning the history today.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Suicidal thoughts, Cancer, Child abuse, Death, Death of parent, Murder, Slavery, Suicide, Vomit, War, Antisemitism, Genocide, Hate crime, Mental illness, Police brutality, Violence, Child death, Confinement, Grief, Religious bigotry, Self harm, Terminal illness, and Torture