From Publishers Weekly
Told in comic-strip format, the second half of Spiegelman's profoundly moving family memento of his parents' survival of the Holocaust and of his own coming to terms with their tragedies, should be as popular as the first installment ( Maus , 1987). A cartoon featuring Jews as mice, Germans as truculent cats and Poles as pigs might sound flip, but the quasi-innocent simplification of the comic-book genre turns out to be a surgical instrument baring the malignancy of adult evil. The action shuttles between the Catskills, where Spiegelman's father, Vladek, basks in retirement, and Nazi concentration camps, where Vladek and his wife, Anja, secretly communicated before their miraculous reunion. She committed suicide in 1968, leaving no note. There are moments of quirky, uneasy, liberating humor, but make no mistake, Maus II is deadly serious. A timeless book, it burns into the mind.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --Ce texte fait référence à l'édition Relié .
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --Ce texte fait référence à l'édition Relié .
From Library Journal
Spiegelman's Maus, A Survivor's Tale (Pantheon, 1987) was a breakthrough, a comic book that gained widespread mainstream attention. The primary story of that book and of this sequel is the experience of Spiegelman's father, Vladek, a Polish Jew who survived the concentration camps of Nazi Germany during World War II. This story is framed by Spiegelman's getting the story from Vladek, which is in turn framed by Spiegelman's working on the book after his father's death and suffering the attendant anxiety and guilt, the ambivalence over the success of the first volume, and the difficulties of his "funny-animal" metaphor. (In both books, he draws the char acters as anthropomorphic animals-- Jews are mice, Poles pigs, Germans cats, Americans dogs, and French frogs.) The interconnections and complex characterizations are engrossing, as are the vivid personal accounts of living in the camps. Maus and Maus . . . II are two of the most important works of comic art ever published. Highly recommended, espe cially for libraries with Holocaust collec tions. See also Harry Gordon's The Shadow of Death: The Holocaust in Lithuania , reviewed in this issue, p. 164; previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 7/91.
- Keith R.A. DeCandido, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --Ce texte fait référence à l'édition Relié .
- Keith R.A. DeCandido, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --Ce texte fait référence à l'édition Relié .
