But if the notion of a canon means anything, Maus is there at the heart of it. Maus is a masterpiece, and it's in the nature of such things to generate mysteries, and pose more questions than they answer. at one and the same time a novel, a documentary, a memoir, and a comic book. Art Spiegelman's Maus is just such a book EsquireĪ remarkable work, awesome in its conception and execution. 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 TimesĪ quiet triumph, moving and simple - impossible to describe accurately, and impossible to achieve in any medium but comics Washington PostĪll too infrequently, a book comes along that' s as daring as it is acclaimed. Maus approaches the unspeakable through the diminutive. 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 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 EcoĪ remarkable feat of documentary detail and novelistic vividness.an unfolding literary event New York Times Book Review The most affecting and successful narrative ever done about the Holocaust Wall Street Journal Maus is terrifying not for its brutality, but for its tenderness and guilt New YorkerĪn epic story told in tiny pictures New York Times Spiegelman has turned the exuberant fantasy of comics inside out by giving us the most incredible fantasy in comics' history: something that actually occurred. The artwork is so accomplished, forceful and moving TimeOut In the tradition of Aesop and Orwell, it serves to shock and impart powerful resonance to a well-documented subject. One of the clichés about the Holocaust is that you can't imagine it - Spiegelman disproves this theory IndependentĪ brutally moving work of art Boston Globe The first masterpiece in comic book history New Yorker

Maus I by Art Spiegelman