Maus II
1991
- nyt:paperback_graphic_books=2012-01-07
- united states
- biography
- poland
- holocaust, jewish (1939-1945)
- holocaust survivors
- comic books, strips
- children of holocaust survivors
- holocaust, jewish (1939-1945) fast (ocolc)fst00958866
- judenvernichtung
The story
"Acclaimed as a quiet triumph and a brutally moving work of art, the first volume of Art Spiegelman's Mausintroduced readers to Vladek Spieglman, a Jewish survivor of Hitler's Europe, and his son, a cartoonist trying to come to terms with his father, his father's terrifying story, and History itself. Its form, the cartoon (the Nazis are cats, the Jews mice), succeeds perfectly in shocking us out of any lingering sense of familiarity with the events described, approaching, as it does, the unspeakable through the diminutive. This second volume, subtitled And Here My Troubles Began, moves us from the barracks of Auschwitz to the bungalows of the Catskills. Genuinely tragic and comic by turns, it attains a complexity of theme and a precision of thought new to comics and rare in any medium. Mausties together two powerful stories: Vladek's harrowing take of survival against all odds, delineating the paradox of family life in the death camps, and the author's account of his tortured relationship with his aging father. At every level this is the ultimate survivor's tale-and that too of the children who somehow survive even the survivors." --Front flap
What it’s like
Stark black-and-white ink drawings on blank, unshaded panels, the figures reduced to mice and cats with heavy, dense linework that feels hand-inked and unhurried. Its prose-like captions in a plain, rhythmic voice do much of the emotional work, shifting between a father's wry, halting reminiscence and a son's clipped, anxious present-day narration. Scenes move from the claustrophobic bunks of a camp to a sunlit, overstuffed Catskills bungalow, and the contrast of those settings gives the book its unsettling, bittersweet texture. The vibe is grave, rueful and quietly absurd, a serious read to take slowly in one sitting or over several evenings. Violence and cruelty are present and discussed frankly, including death, deprivation and suicide, though nothing is rendered in gratuitous gore; the horror lands through implication and the stark drawings more than through spectacle. Suited to readers drawn to history, to family-strain stories and to intimate memoir, and to anyone who wants a hard, humane book that trusts them with difficult material.
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