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MAUS: A Survivor's Tale, is the story of Vladek Spiegelman, a Jewish survivor of Hitler's Europe and of his son, a cartoonist who tries to come to terms with his father, his father's terrifying story, and History itself. Its form, the cartoon (the Nazis are cats, the Jews mice) succeeds perfectly in shocking us out of any lingering sense of familiarity with the events described, approaching, as it does, the unspeakable through the diminutive. It is, as the New York Times Book Review has commented, " a remarkable feat of documentary detail and novelistic vividness...an unfolding literary event." Maus tells two powerful stories: The first is Spiegeleman's father's account of how he and his wife survived Hitler's Europe, the second of the author's tortured relationship with his aging father as they try to lead a normal life against the backdrop of history..... |
