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I read The Complete Maus by Art Spiegelman simply because everybody told met that with my interest in Holocaust literature, I HAD to read it.  So of course, I did.

If you are not familiar with The Complete Maus (Maus I and Maus II), let me briefly fill you in.  It’s  told in alternating viewpoints between Art Spiegelman’s interviewing his father about his survival during the Holocaust in the present and the retelling of those experiences in the past.  It’s also very much about the relationship between Art and his father.  Art has a difficult time understanding his father.  Although the war is long over, it’s effects are still felt every day in their family.

The Complete Maus feels very much like a documentary, one that you would watch on film.  But it’s a memoir, and let’s not forget the most important part about this book:  it’s also a graphic novel.  Different nationalities are depicted as different animals.  The Jews are mice and the Germans are cats representing a evil cat and mouse game.  The Poles are pigs, the Americans are dogs, the French are pigs and so on.

The Complete Maus really surprised me.  I don’t know what I was expecting but I know it wasn’t the father-son relationship, but I liked it.  Art Spiegelman did a great job showing how difficult it was to get his father’s story and how stressful it was to share it with us.  It felt like a full circle story.

I was also surprised that all the animals actually looked like humans with the exception of their heads.  I guess I wasn’t expecting how realistic it was, I thought it would be more “animal-ish.”  After I had this thought, I did some Google searches and of course, fell upon Wikipedia.   There it states that all the animals are drawn alike, because ultimately Spiegelman was showing that all humans are alike and that it’s crazy to try to divide them by nationalistic, religious, or racial lines.  The depiction of animals does make it easier for the reader to digest given the grim topic.  I think it would be hard to read a graphic novel that showed humans being abused in the worst scenarios possible.

The only negative thing that I can say about it is . . . oh dear, do I dare say?  Yes, I do.  I actually thought that the illustrations were pretty awful.  It was hard for me to read nearly 300 pages when the illustrations were not dynamic enough for my tastes.  I guess I was expecting something amazing, the way people were raving about it.  I was disappointed.  Don’t expect anything spectacular.  I think the idea behind the illustrations and the text is what carries this book, not the illustrations themselves.

The Complete Maus is a good addition to Holocaust literature, and it certainly is a unique approach and if you have interest either in the Holocaust or graphic novels, you should give this one a try.  If you don’t have interest in either, it probably won’t be for you.

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