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Maus II
A Survivor's Tale: And Here My Troubles Began
First published 1992 · 144 pages
A stark, visually inventive exploration of unimaginable historical trauma and the complicated, messy reality of surviving it.
What it feels like
Reading this book is a profoundly grounding and harrowing experience, pulling you simultaneously into the suffocating terror of the past and the frustrating, mundane friction of the present. The narrative moves at a steady, deliberate pace, anchored by stark, unvarnished dialogue and striking visual metaphors that refuse to let you look away. It feels claustrophobic yet deeply intimate, balancing the unimaginable scale of historical atrocity with the deeply personal, often messy reality of a fraught father-son relationship. There is no easy heroism here, only the raw, unsentimental truth of survival and the heavy, lingering shadow it casts on the next generation. It will deeply resonate with readers who seek unflinching, emotionally complex explorations of memory, grief, and intergenerational trauma.
- Mood
- harrowing
- claustrophobic
- haunting
- poignant
- Tone
- unflinching
- raw
- darkly comedic
- confessional
- unsentimental
- Pace
- steady
- Themes
- intergenerational trauma · burden of survival · fraught family dynamics · weight of memory · legacy of grief
- The writing
- Stark, vernacular dialogue and unvarnished narration work in tandem with expressionistic, black-and-white artwork to strip away all sentimentality.
- The arc
- Begins in the suffocating dread of historical atrocity and resolves into a lingering, complicated ache of familial grief and unresolved trauma.
- Who it's for
- Readers who appreciate profound, historically grounded narratives that explore the messy, unheroic realities of trauma and its aftermath.
Content notes
- Holocaust
- genocide
- antisemitism
- suicide
- starvation
- graphic violence
- emotional abuse
About the book
"Acclaimed as a quiet triumph and a brutally moving work of art, the first volume of Art Spiegelman's Mausintroduced readers to Vladek Spieglman, a Jewish survivor of Hitler's Europe, and his son, a cartoonist trying to come to terms with his father, his father's terrifying story, and History itself. Its form, the cartoon (the Nazis are cats, the Jews mice), succeeds perfectly in shocking us out of any lingering sense of familiarity with the events described, approaching, as it does, the unspeakable through the diminutive.
This second volume, subtitled And Here My Troubles Began, moves us from the barracks of Auschwitz to the bungalows of the Catskills. Genuinely tragic and comic by turns, it attains a complexity of theme and a precision of thought new to comics and rare in any medium. Mausties together two powerful stories: Vladek's harrowing take of survival against all odds, delineating the paradox of family life in the death camps, and the author's account of his tortured relationship with his aging father. At every level this is the ultimate survivor's tale-and that too of the children who somehow survive even the survivors." --Front flap
Description from Open Library.
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