Book review - Maus
Apr. 10th, 2022 04:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tiggymalvern
My response to the furore that erupted over a US school board banning Art Spiegelman's Maus was to buy it. And since I wasn't the only one who had that idea, I had to wait a while for my copy to arrive before I read it.
It really is that good. More than just a story of how one man and his wife survived the Shoah, through a combination of ingenuity, some good planning and random chance, it's also the story of how those events affected their life afterwards, and their son. In particular the agonising of the book's author over the portrayal of his father really comes across. If he shows his father honestly, as a cantankerous old man who was a terrible father, is he perpetuating Jewish stereotypes and giving ammunition to the anti-Semites who say that the Jews deserved what happened to them in Europe? In the combination of the past story with the current one, the devoted husband who strived so hard to save his family, and the demanding, unreasonable person he became, there's a lot of depth and nuance that would have been missed from a straightforward historical tale.
There are a couple of minor things that bothered me, and that would probably have been done differently if the book had been published today instead of decades ago. In portraying the characters as various animals, and given a story about genocide being committed upon a race of people based on nasty stereotypes, it might have been better not to go with the stereotype of drawing French people as frogs. It's clearly not meant in a negative way - the author's own wife is French and drawn that way - but it's not a good choice.
As for the grounds which the school board gave for banning Maus - bad language and nudity - yeah, no. When you're writing about people living through the Holocaust, frankly some mild blasphemy should be the least of the bad language that's deserved. And yes, the mice that have been wearing clothes through most of the book are stripped naked by the Germans on arrival at Auschwitz. They're still mice, and a less sexual context for nudity cannot be imagined. But we all already knew that the excuses given for banning it were so much bollocks, so no surprise there.
It really is that good. More than just a story of how one man and his wife survived the Shoah, through a combination of ingenuity, some good planning and random chance, it's also the story of how those events affected their life afterwards, and their son. In particular the agonising of the book's author over the portrayal of his father really comes across. If he shows his father honestly, as a cantankerous old man who was a terrible father, is he perpetuating Jewish stereotypes and giving ammunition to the anti-Semites who say that the Jews deserved what happened to them in Europe? In the combination of the past story with the current one, the devoted husband who strived so hard to save his family, and the demanding, unreasonable person he became, there's a lot of depth and nuance that would have been missed from a straightforward historical tale.
There are a couple of minor things that bothered me, and that would probably have been done differently if the book had been published today instead of decades ago. In portraying the characters as various animals, and given a story about genocide being committed upon a race of people based on nasty stereotypes, it might have been better not to go with the stereotype of drawing French people as frogs. It's clearly not meant in a negative way - the author's own wife is French and drawn that way - but it's not a good choice.
As for the grounds which the school board gave for banning Maus - bad language and nudity - yeah, no. When you're writing about people living through the Holocaust, frankly some mild blasphemy should be the least of the bad language that's deserved. And yes, the mice that have been wearing clothes through most of the book are stripped naked by the Germans on arrival at Auschwitz. They're still mice, and a less sexual context for nudity cannot be imagined. But we all already knew that the excuses given for banning it were so much bollocks, so no surprise there.
