From the Bookshelf of Ultimate Popsugar Reading Challenge…

The Complete Maus

Art Spiegelman

Start date: October 1, 2023

Finish date: October 31, 2023

Discussion: Current Monthly Group Read

Why we're reading this: October 2023 group read for "banned book"…more
[close] October 2023 group read for "banned book"

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What Members Thought

Jul 09, 2013 CrystalIsReading on StoryGraph rated it really liked it

Shelves: non-fiction, graphic-novels-comics, around-the-world-challenge

These two volumes just blew me away. It's not that I haven't read Holocaust stories before. It's not that I didn't know that people can be evil, and that horrific things were done during the Holocaust. But something about this story made it all feel so rivetingly horrible that I couldn't look away. Maybe it was the brilliant use of (frightened) mice to represent Jewish characters, and (cruel) cats to represents the Nazis/ Germans (also dogs as Americans, pigs as Poles, and frogs as French). Mayb These two volumes just blew me away. It's not that I haven't read Holocaust stories before. It's not that I didn't know that people can be evil, and that horrific things were done during the Holocaust. But something about this story made it all feel so rivetingly horrible that I couldn't look away. Maybe it was the brilliant use of (frightened) mice to represent Jewish characters, and (cruel) cats to represents the Nazis/ Germans (also dogs as Americans, pigs as Poles, and frogs as French). Maybe it was Art Spiegelman's genius with both words and pictures in general, or the way he seamlessly intertwined his present-day experiences with his father into his father's stories of the past. It wasn't that any one character in this story was a wonderful person--everyone in the story is flawed and struggling. Vladek is especially difficult to like, despite or perhaps because of his compelling story. Only Artie's wife Francoise, who is rarely in the story, comes close to being simply a nice person. Even fragile Anja seems more selfish and weak than good and kind throughout much of the story. And yet I was compelled by their stories, drawn to read to the last sad word.
I felt along with Artie his frustration with his father, as well as his love, and his sadnes. I felt along with his father's stories, told in his own wonderful Old World accent and sentence structure (It was like listening to older Jewish friends of mine talk. I loved the sounds of it.), the fear, the grief, the loss, and the absolute darkness of so many of his life's experiences. I felt like the second volume lagged a little, for me. Reading about Vladek's life, health, and troubled marriage spiraling out of control, and Artie struggling to come to grips with it, and help his father as much as his own sanity would allow--it's in some ways the saddest part of the story. Broken people trying desperately to do the best for each other than they know how, and grappling with the fall out when it's not enough. So in volume two, I felt like I was distracted more from the Holocaust narrative by Vladek and Artie's drama. The story itself was, if anything, more horrific, though, as Vladek relates in detail his experiences in the camp.
This isn't fun reading, but it's amazing reading, compelling on emotional levels, brilliant on artistic levels, and eye-opening on historical levels. Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it, and God forbid we should ever again repeat such a dark time in human history. ...more

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Nov 09, 2018 Laurie rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 2018

It should be no surprise to hear that this is super good. I avoided reading it for a long time due to the heavy subject matter. Obviously there is a lot in here that’s difficult to read, but it also has hope. The personalization of the story made me really connect with it in a way that I haven’t experienced with other books about the Holocaust. I highly recommend this.

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