Maus

Maus is a graphic novel by American cartoonist Art Spiegelman. In it, Spiegelman interviews his father about his experiences as a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor. The book makes use of postmodern techniques in its presentation, most strikingly in its depiction of different races of humans as different kinds of animals, with Jews as mice, Germans as cats and Poles as pigs. It has been difficult to classify, sometimes being labeled memoir, biography, history, fiction, autobiography, or a mix of genres. It was the first comic book to win a Pulitzer Prize. The story alternates between two... timelines. In the "present" frame tale, beginning in 1978 in Rego Park, New York, Spiegelman talks with his father about his Holocaust experiences, gathering material for the Maus project he is about to begin. In the "past", Spiegelman depicts his father's experiences, starting in the years immediately leading up to World War II. Much of the story revolves around Spiegelman's troubled relationship with his father, and the absence of his mother, who committed suicide when he was 20, and whose own written accounts of Auschwitz were destroyed by her grief-stricken husband.
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