Joining a long list of books depicting the Holocaust horror, Maus manages to deliver its somber tale with an almost light-hearted twist.
When Art Spiegelman created a graphic novel in two volumes explaining the life of his father, Vladek Spiegelman, a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor, he was thinking about a legacy onto the future. As a son trying to understand and help his father, Art Spiegelman has managed to represent in his work the burden of creating this series: capturing the story while listening to his father describe in a detailed, straightforward manner, all the horrors he and his family had endured.
The artistic choice of depicting Jews as mice, Nazis as cats and other groups as different animals, brings to the surface the relationships at the time between these, and presents a unique view on the terrible events that happened during those years.
Published between 1980 and 1991, Maus is still the only graphic novel to have won the Pulitzer Prize, an amazing achievement that will not surprise readers once they acquaint themselves with the books. I had only heard about Maus a few years ago but discovered that some of my friends had read it back at school. I could just imagine how a teacher could dig deep into the different aspects of the war and its consequences through this masterpiece.
As a novel that touches on a delicate well-known topic, it does so with extreme care and honesty. It is refreshing to observe a young man interested in his father’s side of the story and choosing to transmit his experiences in a novel way.
Whether you are a teenager or an adult, an assiduous graphic novel reader or a first timer, Spiegelman’s work carries a message very much worth sharing.
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