Scan barcode
A review by jhbandcats
The Complete Maus: A Survivor's Tale by Art Spiegelman
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
sad
tense
fast-paced
5.0
Devastating. I can’t begin to imagine how truly horrific the Holocaust was. It must have been so hard for Art Spiegelman to listen to his father tell of his experiences from the mid-1930s to the end of the war. Spiegelman is masterful in turning his father’s words into a visual document of the devastation.
Maus I deals more with the lead-up to the incarceration, torture, and death of the Jews in Polish ghettos and concentration camps. Maus II is more about enduring the camps and finally being saved, and Spiegelman’s fraught relationship with his emotionally damaged father. Everyone in both his mom and his dad’s family was killed, literally dozens were murdered - well, one of his dad’s brothers survived - and his mother, overcome by it all, committed suicide when Spiegelman was twenty. This, of course, further damaged his father, already a man in deep psychological and emotional pain.
Astoundingly good and beyond horrible at the same time. Everyone should read this.
Maus I deals more with the lead-up to the incarceration, torture, and death of the Jews in Polish ghettos and concentration camps. Maus II is more about enduring the camps and finally being saved, and Spiegelman’s fraught relationship with his emotionally damaged father. Everyone in both his mom and his dad’s family was killed, literally dozens were murdered - well, one of his dad’s brothers survived - and his mother, overcome by it all, committed suicide when Spiegelman was twenty. This, of course, further damaged his father, already a man in deep psychological and emotional pain.
Astoundingly good and beyond horrible at the same time. Everyone should read this.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Deportation, Forced institutionalization, Hate crime, Child death, Confinement, Death, Death of parent, Genocide, Antisemitism, Suicide, Violence, Gore, Grief, Mental illness, Murder, Racism, and War