Book #7: The Complete Maus

"Maus," by Art Spiegelman, is a book I never would have read if it didn’t keep popping up lists of books that I should know about and consume. Best of the best types of lists, and it makes me uneasy when there are books on best-of lists that I haven’t read. So I sat down with “The Complete Maus,” in which Spiegelman tries to make sense of his father’s life story. He has to make sense of the horrific life his father lived before he was even born, as a Jew forced into concentration camps during the Holocaust. And he has to make sense of the man that his father has become, a cranky, miserly, demanding old man, a man so miserable that his wife, Spiegelman’s mother, committed suicide.

Well, if you’re going to conquer a story like that, you might as well use a graphic novel format and draw your main characters as animals. In this book, Jews are drawn as mice, and the Germans are drawn as cats. There are all sorts of deep things going on with this – the Germans called the Jews “vermin” and using animals shows how dehumanizing the whole period of time was. And the format makes this story on the one hand palatable, since it’s very easy to keep reading a comic book than to consume massive amounts of text when you’re trying to understand the awful things happening…but even in comic book form, the horrible things that happen to a mouse are enough to make you stop, pause and remember this happened to humans. I feel like I’m not being very insightful or original about this because I’m tired, but suffice it to say that you know, I can see how it won the Pulitzer Prize and is considered so influential and whatnot. But then, I haven’t read a ton of graphic novels, so maybe it’s easy for me to buy into the hype.

I also just liked the story on a writerly level; Spiegelman inserts himself into the story as a guy trying to drag this story out of his grumpy dad. I know he was doing that so he could write a book that could be published, but I read it more just as a diary, as a way for this guy to write down the story so it could always be there, unlike his mother’s journals, which his father burned. It may not be a perfect record of what happened to his family in the past, but it’s all he has, and at the end of the day, all kids have is what their parents told them, whether it was true or not. Or whether it was as historic as this or not. It was what it was. As Spiegelman the character tells a reporter in the book, “I never thought of reducing it to a message.” So maybe I should stop trying to find one, and go to bed.