A review by paigieodo
The Complete Maus by Art Spiegelman

challenging dark emotional sad fast-paced

4.0

Maus is a moving memoir, but not an inspirational one. It’s honest. It’s, at times, a plain retelling of one of the most horrifying periods of violence and genocide in human history—no blush, no moralizing, just an open-faced laying out of events. It is one of the most comprehensive Holocaust stories I’ve encountered, almost clinically blatant and descriptive, but its graphic novel format touches the part of the human reader that empathizes with emotional fanfare. Maus refuses to valorise. Instead, it humanizes, so that the dehumanization of its subjects feels so much more jarring. Spiegelman’s shadowy art style is so well suited to the setting of this book—stark, alarming, uneasy, industrial, detailed, often messy-looking. An important historiography executed in an under-utilized format. 4 stars.
Expand filter menu Content Warnings