The Complete MAUS Synopsis
Maus tells the story of Vladek Spiegelman, a Jewish survivor of Hitler's Europe, and his son, a cartoonist coming to terms with his father's story. Approaching the unspeakable through the diminutive (the Nazis are cats, the Jews mice), Vladek's harrowing story of survival is woven into the author's account of his tortured relationship with his aging father.
Against the backdrop of guilt brought by survival, they stage a normal life of small arguments and unhappy visits, studying the bloody pawprints of history and tracking its meaning for those who come next.
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Art Spiegelman Press Reviews
The first masterpiece in comic book history - New Yorker
One of the cliches about the Holocaust is that you can't imagine it - Spiegelman disproves this theory - Independent
A brutally moving work of art - Boston Globe
In the tradition of Aesop and Orwell, it serves to shock and impart powerful resonance to a well-documented subject. The artwork is so accomplished, forceful and moving - TimeOut
Spiegelman has turned the exuberant fantasy of comics inside out by giving us the most incredible fantasy in comics' history: something that actually occurred. Maus is terrifying not for its brutality, but for its tenderness and guilt - New Yorker
An epic story told in tiny pictures - New York Times
The most affecting and successful narrative ever done about the Holocaust - Wall Street Journal
Maus is a book that cannot be put down, truly, even to sleep...when you finish Maus, you are unhappy to have left that magical world and long for the sequel that will return you to it -- Umberto Eco A remarkable feat of documentary detail and novelistic vividness...an unfolding literary event - New York Times Book Review
The Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus tells the story of Vladek Spiegelman, a Jewish survivor of Hitler's Europe, and his son, a cartoonist coming to terms with his father's story. Maus approaches the unspeakable through the diminutive. Its form, the cartoon (the Nazis are cats, the Jews mice), shocks us out of any lingering sense of familiarity and succeeds in 'drawing us closer to the bleak heart of the Holocaust' - New York Times
A quiet triumph, moving and simple - impossible to describe accurately, and impossible to achieve in any medium but comics - Washington Post
All too infrequently, a book comes along that' s as daring as it is acclaimed. Art Spiegelman's Maus is just such a book - Esquire
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 Maus is a masterpiece, and it's in the nature of such things to generate mysteries, and pose more questions than they answer. But if the notion of a canon means anything, Maus is there at the heart of it. Like all great stories, it tells us more about ourselves than we could ever suspect -- Philip Pullman Spiegelman's Maus changed comics forever. Comics now can be about anything -- Alison Bechdel Reading [his work] has been an amazing lesson in storytelling - Etgar Keret
It can be easy to forget how much of a game-changer Maus was. - Washington Post
