Penguin Books, $10.50
Short Review:
A point a lot of the reviews of this book make is that the anthropomorphising of the different races in the book (Jews are mice, Poles are pigs, Germans/Nazis (There are no non-Nazi Germans) are cats) causes you to step back and reevaluate the subject, which is too big without such signs. This is, to say the least, a curious view. It seems to imply that Jews reading this would be shocked by the scale without it, and more tellingly, that Gentiles need a hook to get them into the series. As a non-Jew myself, I must point out that I have no trouble identifying the good from the bad in any tale, and the animal heads don't do much for me. If anything, it serves the same purpose as the Hitler quote at the start: it dehumanises the Nazis, removes the need to consider them as people, so that they are just objects of anger. Spiegelman should know the danger of this. Still, it's an interesting hook, and produces a few nice scenes
Aside from the harrowing tales of the camps, the book also contains autobiographical segments, of Spiegelman's relationship with his father, the first person narrator of the war segments. The picture of his father is surprisingly unsympathetic, and filled with the broken speech patterns and garrulousness that you would expect of a man of his age. If the scenes from the Holocaust serve to emphasise mans inhumanity to man (or not, due to the hook), the present day sections show a difficult relationship between an ex mental patient son and his remarried father with heart-touching accuracy.
Andrew These reviews are copyright the authors