It sucks when you choose a book people don't like for Book Club. And naturally it's the opposite when you do. Lauren, who chose Maus, has had an impeccable record so far so the stakes were high but she delivered. Maus was loved. Everyone should read this book. Probably today. If not then tomorrow is great too.
Maus (the only graphic novel to have won a Pulitzer Prize) is by New Yorker Art Spiegelman and it retells the story of his mother and father's struggle for survival during the second world war including the incredibly harrowing time they spent as prisoners of war in Auschwitz.
If you've heard of it before or just taken a glance at the cover above then what you probably know already is that the Jewish characters are portrayed as mice, the Nazis as cats, the Polish as pigs, the Americans as dogs and so on. Strangely enough it doesn't create the emotional distance you might suspect, the characters are very human and obviously the narrative is suspenseful and heart breaking.
Maus is more than just a survival tale though, it explores the complicated relationship between Art and his father. Art was born post-war and recorded his fathers life story intermittently in the years before he died. The story of the second world war is punctuated by erratic, frustrating and often humorous interactions between father and son. It also explores issues around survivor guilt. Sidebar here: Check out this
Book Club who wore masks for their meeting. Topical. And creepy.
Back at our Book Club inbetween tea and oat biscuits (I'd given up chocolate for the week in a failed social experiment to break a bad food habit) Amy mentioned that reading graphic novels takes some adjustment as you tend to power ahead with the story without taking enough time to enjoy the illustrations.
I recommend some light training in the form of manga - not only will you need to remember to read these from back to front but you also need to retrain your eyes to move from left to right. It's Olympic-style preparation not unsimilar to what I'm sure Ian Thorpe is doing right now. My reccommended starting point is Nana comics which my friend Amy introduced me to while she was living in Japan. It's a series (addictive, just like a bad food habit) about a super straight and preppy girl called Nana who meets a super cool and radical girl, also named Nana, on the bullet train on the night they are both moving to Tokyo. They're complete opposites so of course they end up moving in together and being BFFs. One plays in a band, one works in a store and they both wear a lot of Vivienne Westwood. (I've read 12 so far and have two of the movies.)
Anyway this wasn't our first graphic novel, last year we did Persepolis. An amazing story
by Marjane Satrapi about her childhood and early adult years in Iran during and after the Islamic revolution. Little, uh, on the heavier side than the Nana comics but also, outstanding.
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