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The graphic novel Maus by Art Spiegelman has been making its rounds in the American news circuit ever since a school in Tennessee banned the book from its curriculum in January. (Of course, they banned it for bad words and a naked lady, no other reason, no sir.) There have been quite a few opinion columns, think pieces, twitter threads, tumblr essays since then on why this is a Bad Idea, and more cheeky news articles about how this has actually spurred more people to read it.
Including me.
In university, I actually took a course on graphic novels, and we discussed Maus. We never read it directly, though. I’ve been aware of the story for awhile—this is not the first time it has found itself on banned book lists—but haven’t actually sat down and read all of it before. So, after reading one too many of those essays about how it’s very dumb to take a book like this out of a school’s curriculum (and it is), I sat down and committed myself to it for an evening.
Maus is not a long work, though it is divided into two volumes. Its pacing, including the narrator himself, keeps things going at a good clip. It doesn’t devolve into a list of events, but it almost does, too, in a way—there were just so many things that happened. Both of Spiegelman’s parents survived Auschwitz, but it starts long before that, before the war got underway. It shows what their life had been before. It shows how there was a slow degradation of rights, of dignity, and the building of fear and desperation counterpoint to that.
The story is what the author and artist got from his father in a semi-biographical, semi-autobiographical setting. This is his family’s story. This is largely his father’s story, but we’re always rooted in the present, by Spiegelman’s very human conflict with his father, his grief over his mother’s suicide, and the generational trauma he inherited. Grief is threaded throughout the story, but very rarely the sobbing, crying, hysterical breakdowns. It’s loss. It’s loss, and loss, and more loss, and even more loss—and then the survivors, afterward, trying to live their lives again.
It doesn’t shy a moment about anything that happened. That’s probably a large reason why there is so much pearl-clutching over this (even if conservative school boards claim it’s about bad words and breasts). The prisoners knew what the ovens were. They knew the rate at which people were dying. They knew, in horrible detail, how people were dying. And Spiegelman illustrates this in a poignant and horrifying manner. But he never devolves into trauma porn, either.
I’ve read my fair share of Holocaust stories. I enjoyed Number the Stars, and Night was part of my AP English curriculum. I’ve watched most of The Boy In The Striped Pajamas and Schindler’s List. But Maus hits differently. It’s a retelling of the author’s father’s life, as a start, and it’s so interwoven with what the present is like for them afterward that it’s more humanizing than any other number of stories about sad-eyed, starving children and heroic gentiles.
And it makes the monstrous parts all that much starker, too. It’s probably the books’ greatest strength. I recommend it to anyone who hasn’t read it yet, because it’s a view of the Holocaust and World War 2 that you won’t find anywhere else, nor illustrated so emotionally.
