A review by octavia_cade
Maus: A Survivor's Tale. My Father Bleeds History by Art Spiegelman

dark emotional sad tense medium-paced

5.0

Oh, this was depressing. Excellently done, but depressing. And how could it not be? The family history of the author's parents, how they ran and hid and were captured during World War Two, persecuted for being Jewish. The strain of never quite knowing who can be trusted, and how it contrasts with the everyday family experiences of marriage and family, is horrible. The part about deciding whether or not to send their little child away, knowing that the wrong choice will result in their death, and then having them actually die because of it... there's no recovery from that, there just isn't. And then at the end - I don't want to say it's an equal horror, because of course it isn't - the father's destruction of the mother's records, and the author's accusation of murder: impulsive, so wrong, and yet accurate as well in its way. It's just all horrifically painful.

There's something awfully sinister, too, in the decision to use animals as people here - especially the Nazis as cats, always hunting after rodents. I can't say that I was hugely compelled by the artwork here, but that particular decision by Spiegelman was genius.