The Complete MAUS

A profound exploration of survival and family legacy

Art Spiegelman author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Penguin Books Ltd

Published:2nd Oct '03

Should be back in stock very soon

The Complete MAUS cover

This graphic novel tells the story of Vladek Spiegelman, a Holocaust survivor, and his son, Art, as they navigate their complex relationship.

In The Complete MAUS, Art Spiegelman masterfully intertwines the harrowing tale of his father, Vladek Spiegelman, a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, with his own experiences as a son grappling with his father's past. The narrative is both poignant and complex, as it delves into the emotional landscape of their relationship, marked by the weight of history and personal trauma. Art uses the unique medium of graphic novels to portray the stark realities of life during World War II, employing anthropomorphic characters—Jews as mice and Nazis as cats—to create a visceral representation of the Holocaust's horrors.

The story unfolds through Vladek's recollections, offering a firsthand account of survival amidst unimaginable adversity. As Art listens to his father's stories, he confronts not only the legacy of trauma but also the challenges of understanding and connecting with a parent who has endured so much. The juxtaposition of their lives—Vladek's past and Art's present—highlights the generational impact of trauma and the struggle for reconciliation.

The Complete MAUS is celebrated as the first graphic novel to win the Pulitzer Prize, a testament to its profound storytelling and artistic innovation. It is not merely a recounting of events but a deep exploration of memory, guilt, and the complexities of familial love, making it a seminal work in both literature and the graphic novel genre.

The first masterpiece in comic book history * New Yorker *
One of the clichés 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 *

ISBN: 9780141014081

Dimensions: 232mm x 161mm x 24mm

Weight: 692g

296 pages