Maus: A Survivor's Tale Author: Art Spiegelman | Language: English | ISBN:
0141014083 | Format: EPUB
Maus: A Survivor's Tale Description
Review
“The most affecting and successful narrative ever done about the Holocaust.”
—The Wall Street Journal
"The first masterpiece in comic book history.”
—The New Yorker“A loving documentary and brutal fable, a mix of compassion and stoicism [that] sums up the experience of the Holocaust with as much power and as little pretension as any other work I can think of.”
—The New Republic
“A quiet triumph, moving and simple—impossible to describe accurately, and impossible to achieve in any medium but comics.”
—The Washington Post
“Spiegelman has turned the exuberant fantasy of comics inside out by giving us the most incredible fantasy in comics’ history: something that actually occurred . . . The central relationship is not that of cat and mouse, but that of Art and Vladek.
Maus is terrifying not for its brutality, but for its tenderness and guilt.”
—The New Yorker
“All too infrequently, a book comes along that’s as daring as it is acclaimed. Art Spiegelman’s
Maus is just such a book.”
—Esquire
“An epic story told in tiny pictures.”
—The New York Times
“A remarkable work, awesome in its conception and execution . . . at one and the same time a novel, a documentary, a memoir, and a comic book. Brilliant, just brilliant.”
—Jules Feffer
--This text refers to an alternate
Paperback
edition.
From the Inside Flap
Volumes I & II in paperback of this 1992 Pulitzer Prize-winning illustrated narrative of Holocaust survival.
--This text refers to an alternate
Paperback
edition.
See all Editorial Reviews
- Paperback: 296 pages
- Publisher: Penguin Books, Limited (UK) (October 1, 2003)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0141014083
- ISBN-13: 978-0141014081
- Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 0.8 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
These books are an easy and fast read, but by no means are they simple. In two slim comic books, Art Spiegelman chronicles his parents' movement from comfortable homes in Poland to the death camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau, and from there to a surreally banal afterlife in upstate New York. We watch the destruction of the Holocaust continue in Spiegelman's father's transformation from a bright, good-looking youth to a miserly neurotic, his mother's deterioration from a sensitive, sweet girl into a suicide, and in the author's own unhappy interactions with his parents.
I have read some of the most negative reviews of these books, and I respectfully disagree. Some negative reviews ("Spiegelman is a jerk") castigate Spiegelman for his shamefully self-interested milking of his father's life and the Holocaust. Other negative reviews find fault with the unoriginality of the story, or discover historical inaccuracies, self-contradictions, or simplifications in the tale. Finally, a set of reviews are upset with Spiegelman's coding of people of different nationalities as animals(especially the Poles, who were also victimized by the Nazis but are depicted as pigs in the comics.)
The first criticism is both deserved and unfair. Deserved, because Spiegelman profits by the pain and death of millions, including his own family. Unfair, because Spiegelman himself consciously provides the basis for our criticism that he mocked and neglected his elderly father at the same time that he fed his own success upon his father's tales. The two volumes echo with his regret and unexpiable guilt at his treatment of his parents, and at his own success and survival. To attack Spiegelman for these things is like scolding a man in the midst of his self-immolation.
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