Book Description

Maus memorializes Spiegelman's father's experience of the Holocaust - it follows his story, frame by frame, from youth and marriage in pre-war Poland to imprisonment in Auschwitz. The 'survivor's tale' that results is stark and unembellished. One of the cliches about the Holocaust is that you can't imagine it - like nuclear war, its horror outfaces the artistic imagination. Spiegelman disproves that theory.

Spiegelman portrays the Nazis as cats, the Jews as mice, the Poles as pigs and the Americans as dogs. They are all terrifyingly human.

An intensely personal account of a family's survival, of hair-breadth escapes and incarceration, [that] deals artfully with experiences and emotions that many might fervently wish to forget. Of how, when life is stripped to subsistence level, trust and betrayal take on unprecedented dimensions. In the tradition of Aesop and Orwell, it serves to shock and impart powerful resonance to what, after all, is a well-documented subject. And the artwork is so accomplished, forceful and moving, without resorting to sentimentality, that it works.

About the Author

Art Spiegelman is a contributing editor and artist for the New Yorker, and co-founder/editor of Raw, the acclaimed magazine of avant-garde comics and graphics. His drawings and prints have been exhibited in museums and galleries here and abroad. Honours he has received for Maus include the Pulitzer Prize, a Guggenheim fellowship, and nominations for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He lives in New York City.