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QC Forum Book Group - Maus Discussion Thread

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Scandanavian War Machine:
alright, amazon says mine has shipped and that it should be here Wednesday! yeehaw


EDIT:

It's here! And it showed up a day earlier than expected!
I'll have to get started right away since I pretty much only read on my lunch breaks these days. So, uh....don't go too fast, the rest of you!

Inlander:
Finished reading it yesterday.

Holy shit I didn't expect it to have the emotional impact it did.

smack that isaiah:
I know.  When i started reading II (the first chapter) had me tearing up in the library.  It's so touching.

Inlander:
I was a bit sceptical about the whole "portraying everyone as animals" thing but it struck me midway through the book that it's actually a very similar device to the "So it goes" refrain Kurt Vonnegut uses throughout Slaughterhouse 5 every time someone or something dies or ceases to exist. In both books the authors are using a fresh phraseology (linguistic for Vonnegut, visual for Spiegelman) to make otherwise jaded readers confront afresh horrors they may have read about countless times before. It's an extraordinarly effective device.

a pack of wolves:
I read something that suggested one of the main functions of depicting everyone as animals was to eventually make ludicrous the whole business of racial division. That makes sense to me, particularly in light of the second book. It starts with Art trying to work out how he should be drawing Francoise (bunny, moose, frog?), who we're already used to seeing as a mouse. Then we get Art's ludicrous proposal for her being shown transforming from a frog into a mouse at the word of a rabbi, just to please Vladek. The whole usage of frogs for French does seem to make plain the ridiculousness of the entire concept (I also like the two glassy-eyed fish sat in a car sporting a British flag in the last chapter for that as well).

Which get's me onto one of my favourite parts, that begins at the start of the second chapter of book two. Here people are shown wearing animal masks over human heads, obscuring their features. Interesting that the characters that appear on the subsequent page aren't real, they're stand-ins for the type of people Art says he was dealing with at the time but this is entirely in his head, not a real event. So we've got the German reporter who's challenging him, asking why young Germans should feel guilty, but he rises up from that pile of corpses. He's not a representative of Germans but of how Art's constructing them. Then there's the Americans, bland and unfazed, calmly filming the celebrity and standing on a pile of corpses to do it. The two I find most fascinating are the mouse masked man I tend to think of as an Israeli reporter and the businessman. In the first panel we see the (possible) Israeli reporter he's drawn with bulging muscles under his suit, butting in with his question, then in the next panel he's corpulent as Art says he might draw Israelis as porcupines. Aggressive and fat with wealth, more stereotypes. The thing that interests me about the final figure (aside from the excellent vest gag) is his mask. What is it? Anyone have a theory? It looks to me like it's the only non-animal mask/head in the book, outside photographs and the Prisoner On The Hell Planet reprint. A mask with its teeth permanently bared. But why is this one character, out of everyone in the book, seemingly masked by his profession (or at least approach to it) instead of his race?

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