europe

This is certainly a very interesting piece of work. I struggle with trying to classify the book because it seems a combination of many types of literature. The layout is like that of a comic strip yet there's nothing humorous about the subject matter. Written like a novel but an actual life account. "Maus . . ." is the first illustrated book I've ever read and I find the use of cartoons actually enhanced the narrative. In "Maus . . ." the author steps outside himself to tell the story of his father's life during the Holocaust. The cartoons are an excellent way to reinforce the power differential among the characters. Spiegelman portrays the Nazis as cats, Jews as mice and non-Jew Poles as pigs. Through these character lenses, the author provides a very moving account of his father's experience while not risking the chance of loosing those who don't want to read a serious or depressing book (I find this one to be neither). The drawings were distracting enough to not overwhelm me with the horrors of the Holocaust yet interesting enough to keep me reading. This is a good read for all ages and should certainly go a long way in educating children on a significant aspect of world history. It's a short, fast read that delivers so much information for so little reading effort. A creative well executed effort on the part of Spiegelman and an enjoyable reading experience for the reader.

Maus draws you in because it is so genuinely personal. Spiegelman's comic is told by Spiegelman himself, who wants to write a comic book about his father, Vladek, who survived the Holocaust. Vladek's story is told by himself through Spiegelman. This allows for the narrative to go outside of the Holocaust, and into the author's life, his difficulty in dealing Vladek, his guilt for his mother's suicide, and the impossible task of trying to comprehend what his parents struggled through.

This is a deeply engrossing book, and because it is in comic form, few people should find it difficult to read. Both volumes can easily be read in a day or two and it should be rewarding and worth your time.

If one can truly see past all the cultural signifiers and content obeisance attached to Maus and simply judge the work on craft alone, one will find a fairly pedestrian work, well told, yet instantly forgettable.

Spiegelman has crafted a shrewd piece of media here, he has mined the true-life experiences of his grandfather to fashion a non-fiction biographic tale of internment in a concentration camp, replacing the Germans with cats and the Jews with mice. Such a choice is guaranteed critic-proof simply because of the subject matter. Publicly, one is not allowed to dislike Maus or find it flawed in any fundamental way; it fosters a mild form of cultural fascism against the dissenter. Recently discussing Maus with someone who thought it profound, I found myself dodging bullets of anti-Semitism and callousness towards the human spirit. But we must understand that Maus the graphic novel has virtually disappeared, its place taken by Maus the "Holocaust for a new Generation" and Maus the "culturally significant signpost of human dignity."

Granted the story is compelling. If Maus had been told as a straight prose work of non-fiction it would have most certainly been published and given average to good marks, quickly joining the legion of Holocaust literature. But should we elevate Maus to the ranks of the graphic novel pantheon just because Spiegelman is Jewish and he used his authentic Jewish roots to tell a story of the Holocaust in pictures? I counter arguments that posit Spiegelman's work as introducing the Holocaust to a new generation (sort of like re-inventing Shakespeare for the geek set?) with the idea that the generation itself should begin to question its own intellectual vigor when we must teach our children about the holocaust using a comic strip. In that case, forget the Bible, why not teach it through a graphic 'Chronicles of Jesus' format, allowing our children to get the story while abandoning the thorny arguments and contradictions that make reading any work of art a challenge to the mind?

I repeat, do we give Maus credibility for simply choosing subject matter? If we do, then we must re-think the way we judge literary works. We must then judge every piece of holocaust literature to be superlative, and regardless of its actual merit, place it on a hallowed shelf above all other literature. We must then judge every piece of art or media the same. In this new critical paradigm, if a graffiti artist painted a series of stick figures across a barren factory wall but above them sprayed the name "Auschwitz," we should take care not remove them. However, if that same artist simply painted a wall full of stick figures, they should be removed post-haste and a steep fine levied against the artist.

I am tired of works being given credibility for subject matter and not for craft. Maus is not a bad book, and may well foster early discussions with children or adolescents about the holocaust. But judged by artistic merit and craft alone it hardly belongs on the same shelf as Watchmen, From Hell, or Miller's Batman writings. In those works, the writers crafted dense literary works that truly transcended the genre and used the form in novel and interesting ways. They did not rely on content alone to sell mediocre work.