The book The Complete Maus by Art Spiegelman is a fantastic book that I strongly recommend you to add to your future to-read list. The book is a comic book. Wait! Before you decided to change your mind just read this out. Spiegelman is writing about the Holocaust and is using a graphic novel medium to express the story. Not only does this make it a fast read, but it also makes it coherent and easy to understand. Secondly, it is an interesting, artistic choice to talk about WWII Poland.
The story simply put is gorgeous. Every detail and brutal act that occurred in the book is captured and shown so well that you feel entrenched in the minds of the characters. This story even shows us [The reader] something new. What life was like for a Polish Jew. Of course, the stories are documented about how life was in the concentration camps from diaries to historical documents; but have you have ever read it from a comic book perpective and from a Polish Jew. I dare to say you have not read a book like this in story and medium.
If you have not guess what genre it is in I am going to tell you. It a piece of non-fiction about Art Spiegelman’s father, Vladek. Art learned from his father WWII stories during a series of interviews in the 1970s and 1980s. During these discussions with his father, we get to see the effects of the camps on family members after the war. Just the the mental damage in this book makes it even more of a tearjerker.
To sum it up, The Complete Maus is not only an enjoyable, action-packed comic, but also a heart wrenching, brilliant novel that makes reading about historical events seem relaxing rather than down right boring.
