Steven Wu's Book Reviews: Maus (Art Spiegelman)

It's difficult to evaluate any work about the Holocaust; the event itself can't help but overwhelm any attempt to talk about it. It's irrelevant, and perhaps even demeaning, to question whether any work about the Holocaust emotionally involves the reader. The fact that some work talks about the Holocaust means that it draws upon the entire store of emotions behind that event, and, however poorly that message is transmitted, at least some of the feeling will get through.

I struggled to keep all this in mind as I read through Maus, Art Spiegelman's groundbreaking graphic novel about his father's travails in Auschwitz (or, as it is sometimes called in the book, Mauschwitz). I won't talk about the purely narrative part of the story; like every other Holocaust survivor's tale, it is harrowing, terrifying, and almost incomprehensible to modern minds. (In one of my favorite parts of Maus, Art Spiegelman says to a Holocaust survivor, "I can't BEGIN to imagine what it felt like." The survivor responds, "How can I explain? ... BOO!" After Spiegelman leaps up in shock, the survivor continues, "It felt a little like that. But ALWAYS!") The question, at least for me, is whether Maus does anything beyond merely presenting the raw historical material to us, and whether it does this extra step well.

Since I really am not sure what I can say, I'll be brief: I thought Maus was good, but it doesn't contribute as much to the inherent emotion of the narrative as it could. Throughout the book, what I reacted to was not anything Spiegelman did, but instead the facts about the Holocaust: facts that would have been just as shocking had they been presented in an encyclopedia. This is not to say that Spiegelman does not present these facts well, but this book was clearly written for people who already knew about the Holocaust, and so a mere re-presentation of what happened, even if it is through one person's experience, is not really that compelling. What was even more frustrating to me was that the one part of the book that I found really compelling--the suicide of Spiegelman's mother--was barely touched upon.

I would still highly recommend this graphic novel, if only for its historical importance. But, although it is well-written and although it deals with an important issue in a faithful way, Maus does not quite reach my pantheon of the greatest graphic novels ever.