Maus – Art Spiegelman

By now anyone reading this blog is bound to be thinking, “God, are there any books you actually like, you moany old witch?” Well, yes, there are and this is one of them. I thought Maus was brilliant, even though it made me cry.

For those who have been living under a stone, or who have a policy of deliberately ignoring comics (foolish!), Maus is the story of the Holocaust, told in cartoon form with the Jews depicted as mice and the Nazis drawn as cats. Never have cartoon mice been so upsetting! It shows how Art’s parents, Vladek and Anja Spiegelman survived the Ghettos and the death camps. There is also a thread of the story set closer to the present day which deals with the author’s difficult relationship with his father.

Despite his victim status, Vladek is not portrayed very sympathetically, and we see that part of the reason for his survival is that he never shared anything if he could trade it instead. Harsh months of saving scraps of paper to swap for extra food or cigarettes to buy favours have left Vladek going through life as a mean, rubbish-hoarding Mr Trebus figure. Vladek’s miserliness and Anja’s suicide in 1968 show that despite emerging alive at the end of the war, both have been seriously damaged by the experience.

Maus: Read it and weep.