Book Review: Maus

Enter Maus, Art Speigelman's masterpiece that won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992. This is an award ever the more prestigious considering it is the only comic book to date to have received the honor. The book itself is about a series of interviews, in which Art has his father, Vladek, recount his memories of the holocaust and Nazi Germany. The book being written in two separate volumes, together was written over the course of 13 years and countless interview with his father.

Indeed all the images in the book are significant, as much as text would be in any other novel. According to interviews with Speigelman, every detail down to the tuft of grass was recorded from his father's recollections. It is a work that strives to preserve extraordinary historical accuracy while still transmitting the feelings of both father and son.

Speigelman conveys tales of his father, and manages to demonstrate what it was like for a Polish Jew in Auschwitz II. At the same time, however, is the story of Art himself and his relationship with his father. 

Interestingly, all nationalities / ethnicities are represented by some sort of animal. Jews as mice, non-Jewish Germans as cats, Poles as pigs, the French as frogs, etc. When in various tales Vladek impersonates Germans, he is depicted as a mouse wearing a cat mask. Notably, also depicted is Art himself, when discussing his own guilt of having never experienced the holocaust, wearing a mouse mask. 

In such a manner the book is written, with many visual subtleties becoming immensely important. It is a novel written in a different medium, and as such the experience of reading it is also very different. The animal metaphor would have been far more difficult to accomplish succesfuly and gracefully in an all text format. 

Maus reads like a movie: recollections transition into actual depictions of events while complementary story lines progress. Never does Art Speigelman directly state his ideas, instead he approaches them from the outside and hints at them with visual and dialogue cues. In using pictures, characters' emotions can be conveyed almost immediately, and precisely, because facial expressions are visible, and do not have to be "described". 

Recently Spiegelman has published MetaMaus (in stores near you). The book/DVD combo is a series of interviews with Spiegelman in which he recounts his own personal motives and explanations of the original book.