The Complete Maus: A Survivor's Tale
The Maus series, Volumes 1 and 2
Art Spiegelman
Pantheon
Nonfiction, Graphic Novel/History/Memoir
***** (Great)
DESCRIPTION: Art Spiegelman always had a troubled relationship with his father, Vlatek. He knew that the man, like Art's mother Anja, had experienced terrible things during Hitler's reign in Europe, but still Vlatek could be so very, very difficult to be around. It wasn't until much later that a grown Art, now a successful cartoonist and writer, decided to try recording his father's experiences in graphic novel form. Thus, in a series of interviews and encounters spanning several years, the story unfolds, the story of how a successful young Jewish man in Poland saw the world he knew destroyed and witnessed horrors no human should ever have to experience again.
This edition includes Volume I: My Father Bleeds History and Volume II: And Here My Troubles Began.
REVIEW: I've heard of this book for many years, a Pulitzer Prize-winning record of one of history's greatest modern atrocities through the eyes of one survivor, but it never quite ventured onto my reading radar. In recent times, as efforts to censor and outright ban books gain more traction (and disturbing signs of history repeating itself play out in broad daylight, to the unheeded warnings of many and the cheers of those too ignorant to know how this story always goes and those gleefully aware and spurring it on), I decided it was high time to give it a try; anything they're trying that hard to silence must be necessary reading. I finally manged to secure a used copy... and I only wish I'd gotten to it sooner.
The tale opens with a brief glimpse of a young Art - portrayed as a mouse, all characters in the book being anthropomorphic animals - out roller skating with friends only to fall behind when his skates break. He goes home to his father, but if he was expecting sympathy, he gets none. "Friends? Your friends?" Vlatek tells his son cynically. "If you could lock them together in a room with no food for a week... then you could see what it is, friends!" This moment sets the stage for the unfolding tale, which takes up again when Art is a grown man, his relationship with Vlatek best described as "complicated"... as are Vlatek's relationships with many people, particularly Mala, the woman he married after Anja's death by suicide. The two snipe at each other ceaselessly, driving one another to their wit's end (with Art too often caught in the middle). Even many years later, Vlatek still mourns Art's mother, herself also a survivor of the camps, a pain that often expresses itself in anger and helpless frustration, not helped by failing health. Art's efforts to record Vlatek's memories are as much about trying to bridge the gap with his father and reconnect with memories of his mother (whose own memoirs Vlatek burned in his grief, a tragedy Art struggles to forgive) as documenting a vital part of world history as experienced by one man. In this way, Art develops both himself and his father as full characters, in the present and the past, not just hollow placeholders to parrot facts and figures about the Holocaust experience. This lends the story more weight than anything I recall reading in history class, driving home that these were people, real people, warts and all, who thought and dreamed and loved and feared, not statistics and not some dismissable "other" from long ago and far away. In the present, Art and Vlatek meet several times, visits often ending in frustration and arguments, while Vlatek's past - starting from just before the young man met his future wife and Art's mother Anja (daughter of a wealthy and influential man who learned too late that money was no shield against evil) and wending through the buildup to Hitler's invasion of Poland and the relentless stripping down of rights and basic humanity on the way to the camps themselves. The illustrations sometimes bleed into surreality, the only way to effectively render the terrible events unfolding. Through it all, Vlatek persisted then as he persists in modern times, through a mix of resourcefulness, luck, and sheer stubbornness, traits Art comes to understand (even if he still can't help but find the old man difficult to the point of exasperation).
Spiegelman's simple, expressive renderings and heavy lines are surprisingly eloquent and effective, and the story as it unfolds in both past and present comes together splendidly, as much a tribute to one man's endurance as a testimony of an ugly time that should never be repeated (and yet, unfortunately, has been and is and most likely will be; I'd call these times and events "inhuman" if they weren't so often the flame to which humanity seems to keep fluttering like a moth, time again and again). This is a book that only becomes more important and even necessary as witnesses to World War II fade in the rear view mirror just as fresh new horrors appear through the mists ahead, a dire warning sign as well as a tiny glimmer of grim hope that maybe, eventually, these new evils too might fall and light return to a darkened world.
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