MAUS: A Survivor's Tale

MAUS: A Survivor's Tale by Art Spiegelman
Published by Pantheon Books in 1986
159 pages
Warning: MAUS contains graphic images, gruesome language, graphic language, nudity, violence and suicide.
Genre: Holocaust, War, Family


MAUS: A Survivor's Tale by Art Spiegelman has been reviewed as "a remarkable work, awesome in its conception and execution...at one and the same time a novel, a documentary, a memoir, and a comic book. Brilliant, just brilliant." -Jules Feiffer

I picked up this book to read it with great expectations. Unfortunately, I was disappointed. The book, a graphic novel, did not deliver like I had hoped. The plot involves a man hearing his father's survival story through the Holocaust. While the illustrations are chilling and some details are gruesome and hard to forget, I was not able to emotionally connect with the characters or the text of the novel. While there is fascinating symbolism and interesting cultural elements, I simply was unable to connect with the characters.

What I did enjoy is the symbolism as the different groups of people were represented by different animals. For instance, the Nazi's were cats, the Jews were mice and the Polish were pigs. A person may read into this symbolism how ever they choose.