The Complete Maus

Art Spiegelman’s Maus is a profound masterpiece that redefines the graphic novel. By depicting Jews as mice and Nazis as cats, it renders the visceral horror of the Holocaust accessible yet devastating. This dual narrative expertly weaves a survivor’s harrowing testimony with a raw, complex father-son relationship. It’s an essential, heart-wrenching meditation on memory, trauma, and inherited guilt.

Love the comic based on history and real social evil

In the fraught times, when the world is tilting more and more to the right, people should read this book and understand what fascism was and is.

"It's a miracle he survived...But in some ways he didn't survive." This story is about the Holocaust, about Jews and their persecution, and about survival and survivors. At least it was meant to be. But it is not just that. It is something more. It is the story of a father and a son. It chronicles a few months in the lives of the duo as the father nags at all the things and all the people around him, and as the son keeps on getting embarrassed and irritated by his father. That is what this book is: the tale of a father and his son. At least that is how it turns out to be. And this is the absolute beauty of this book. Given the subject matter, it could have been a dark and dry story, but the Animal Farm of Spiegelman was easy to wade through because it kept me engaged in the horrors depicted without making me feel blue by overshadowing them with the father-son duo's banter. I've read and watched other works on the second World War and on the Holocaust, and all of them have been difficult to digest because of the harsh realities they describe in their plain manner. Meanwhile, Spiegelman adopted a fresh approach in not only the narrative (father-son dynamic) but also in the medium he chose - that it be a comic, that too with anthropomorphic characters. As for the publication, the paper is thick, semi-gloss and the print is fine. Font and pictures are clear. Bought for ₹494 from Amazing Buy. No complaints regarding quality and delivery.

I was like, let's see. And then I saw, I read, I imagined, I felt, and well, I could never have imagined to experience this lot about the holocaust through a comic art book. But, I did and here, it is- a well deserving Pulitzer Prize winner- it's a very interesting take to discover for the ones who haven't yet!!

Maus is a graphic novel by American cartoonist Art Spiegelman, serialized from 1980 to 1991. It depicts Spiegelman interviewing his father about his experiences as a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor. The work employs postmodern techniques and represents Jews as mice and other Germans and Poles as cats and pigs. Critics have classified Maus as memoir, biography, history, fiction, autobiography, or a mix of genres. In 1992 it became the first graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize. In the frame-tale timeline in the narrative present that begins in 1978 in New York City, Spiegelman talks with his father Vladek about his Holocaust experiences, gathering material for the Maus project he is preparing. In the narrative past, Spiegelman depicts these experiences, from the years leading up to World War II to his parents' liberation from the Nazi concentration camps. Much of the story revolves around Spiegelman's troubled relationship with his father, and the absence of his mother who committed suicide when he was 20. Her grief-stricken husband destroyed her written accounts of Auschwitz. The book uses a minimalist drawing style and displays innovation in its pacing, and structure, and page layouts. A three-page strip also called "Maus" that he made in 1972 gave Spiegelman an opportunity to interview his father about his life during World War II. The recorded interviews became the basis for the graphic novel, which Spiegelman began in 1978. He serialized Maus from 1980 until 1991 as an insert in Raw, an avant-garde comics and graphics magazine published by Spiegelman and his wife, Françoise Mouly, who also appears in Maus. A collected volume of the first six chapters that appeared in 1986 brought the book mainstream attention; a second volume collected the remaining chapters in 1991. Maus was one of the first graphic novels to receive significant academic attention in the English-speaking world. Art Spiegelman bought a spectacular change in the way how people look at comics. Amazon , great job.

‘Maus’ in a way reminded me of the Nadia Murad’s book “the Last Girl”.Both were survivor stories and both were war stories too. Both wars were based on Racism, isn’t most of them are based on that? I have been a big fan of comics while growing up (who isn’t?”) and I thought shifting to the non graphic medium was more mature.Well,I was wrong, obviously.The books of Alan Moore and Frank Miller have showed me that Comics were a spectacular medium when it wanted to be. The Japanese ‘Junji Ito’ was a revelation and now I am constantly digging Graphic novels. Maus is drawn in black and white and the tone fits the story so well. By making the protagonists and antagonists faceless (well, they have faces but he has ingenuously drawn Jews as mice and Germans as cat) he tells us that everything becomes non personal and generic during the time of war, especially the pain, but it is not so. Every guy is fighting his or her battle through the war and each guy’s suffering has its own shades of blue. Pain is looming as a pallid gloom all over them, omnipresent and stifling. It is like there is a thick towel draped over their faces. They have to breathe and see through it and the towel stinks after some time. Read Maus to understand how a war feels like,how hate feels like,how sectarianism feels like,how it feels like to fear for your life every second of the day. A great book in short.

Where do I begin with a masterpiece like this? An unflinching, honest look at one of the worst atrocities in human history. Told through the narrative framing of a son interviewing his father who lived through Auschwitz. The unfolding of the father's story is set against his present day personality, the friction between them, the empty presence of his mother and intergenerational trauma- really, nothing about this book is easy to read and I'm grateful it's entirely in greyscale. The anthromorphic characters add an extra layer to the story. The beginning of volume 2 has the author writing through his writer's block following the success of the first volume, which was one of highlights for me. Highly recommend this to everyone.

It is a brilliant graphic novel that rises the reader's awareness about the Holocaust and the terror of that period of history. Even though everybody has read (or should have read) a lot about the topic, Spiegelman has the bright idea of keeping distance with the plot by depicting Nazis as cats, Jews as rats, Americans as dogs and Poles as pigs although being an autobiographical novel. All in all, "Maus" is a masterpiece worthy of its pulitzer prize.

Jamás había llorado tanto con un cómic, una historia increíble, la edición en pasta dura es bastante buena, de buenísima calidad y las hojas también son increíbles. Merece completamente la pena, la mejor compra para empezar el año.

Series Info/Source: This is the complete Maus graphic novel. I got a copy of this as a Christmas Gift. Thoughts: The dense writing style and heavy lined black and white artwork were a bit intimidating at first but once I got started reading the story I didn’t even notice it or find it hard to read. This story is completely engrossing. Spiegelman does an amazing job of alternating between the past and the present and recounting the intense and sad story of his father living through the Holocaust. What amazed me is he did in a way that was incredibly impactful without ever being too dark. I was completely engrossed in this book from page one. And I quickly grew to love Maus’s father and his family. I was continually surprised how much of Maus’s father’s survival was because of how resourceful his father was. His father is extremely adaptable and takes on every chance he has to learn a new skill, this (along with quite a bit of luck) is the number one thing that leads to him surviving the nightmare of the Holocaust. Is this an uplifting book? Not really, it is more of a cautionary tale. Even though his father survives the Holocaust, the effects continue to echo through his life many years later. The people who survived the events of the Holocaust have to live with the Holocaust forever in their minds and this continues to affect their families generations later. So much thought and skill went into telling this story; it was just incredibly well done. There is some irony to the fact that I asked for this for Christmas and then shortly after it was banned in Texas because of inappropriate content. I don’t know how to tell people this…but the whole Holocaust was inappropriate and it would be really hard to tell an accurate story of what happened without going into some of the violence and death that happened. Is the violence and death presented in an excessive way in this book? Most definitely not. Discussions of the gas chambers and killing of children in the streets of ghettos are addressed matter of factly. Hiding in piles of dead people’s shoes and witnessing the aftermath of a gas chamber are things that really happened. At the time these people were trying to survive one atrocity after another; the atrocities were fact and they are presented as such in this book. People did what they could to keep themselves and their families safe. Should you have your five year old read this? Well do you want to explain the Holocaust to your 5 year old? I might hold off for a bit. We talked about the Holocaust with my son in late elementary/early middle school. He actually checked out this very book from his middle school library and had A LOT of questions for us after he read it. They were excellent questions and we had some very good and thoughtful discussions as a family because of this book. This is a incredibly valuable way to learn about the Holocaust. I think it should be available for everyone in middle school and older to read. My Summary (5/5): Overall I was incredibly impressed with this graphic novel and the amazing job it did blending the past of the Holocaust with the effect it continues to have on people’s day to day lives. I would recommend to middle grade and up readers because the Holocaust is a complicated topic and kids need to be a certain age in order to begin to comprehend cruelty on this scale. Is this book excessively violent or “Inappropriate”? No, not at all. It addresses the topic with excellent candor wrapped into an incredibly engaging story of one man’s survival of these horrific events.

Due to the condition description as "good" I was worried this was a used item. It looks or is brand new, I cannot see that anyone ever touched this book. Great item, thanks.

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