Grace Notes @ Snarkattack

Wow, this book is amazing. I’d read the first part of Art Spiegelman’s Maus a long while ago and recently found myself stranded in a chain bookstore for a few hours so decided to read the second part of this incredibly sad graphic novel. Maybe I was feeling down or something but it almost had me spill a tear or two in public, just to give you an idea of just how depressing it is.

Maus is an account of the graphic novel author’s father’s experiences in Auschwitz, a Polish Jewish man, and one of the most notable things about it is that the Jewish people are characterised as mice, the Nazis are cats, non-Jewish Polish are pigs and so on. It’s a pretty horrific read though at times is funny, tender but always disturbing. It’s the sort of thing that makes one wonder how on earth other human beings can be so horrendously cruel to one another.

It’s absolutely worth reading if you can manage it, though you might not want to read it if you’re feeling down to begin with. The illustrations are absolutely fantastic and grainy in that ink-pen kind of way. It’s also a terribly clever book and gives a glimpse into the life of a Holocaust survivor and just how much of a continued trauma existence afterwards is.