Maus II: A Survivor's Tale (Maus #2) - And Here My Troubles Began

Art Spiegelman

Pantheon

1992

144 páginas

4h 48m

ISBN-10: 0394556550

Acclaimed as a quiet triumph and a brutally moving work of art, the first volume of Art Spieglman's Maus introduced readers to Vladek Spiegleman, 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 familiararity 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. Maus ties together two powerful stories: Vladek's harrowing tale of survival against all odds, delineating the paradox of daily 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.

Resenhas (6)

5 (Perfeito)

Not a beautiful story, but such a necessary one to tell.

This book had me in such a desperate state that I have not managed to come out of yet. It is such a cruel story that, if you have a minimum sense of empathy will make you want to cry again and again. Not only it shows how much our experiences define us like I said on my review of volume 1. It shows what atrocities the humanking is capable of in name of intolerance. As we go through the pages we learn through the voice of Vladek his story, with his basic vocabulary, he sounds like an inocent being, almost childish, telling such heartbreaking and traumatizing experiences that will often make you question all of your life choices and privileges. All of that moved only by his will to survive, and to help those who he loves, to survive. Which in the end he manages to (otherwise he wouldn't be telling the story), but all of that only for us, along with his son Art, to question if he did do anything more than just survive? He ends as a broken and emotionally crippled man that is uncapable of mantaining any healthy relationships, and there is nothing we can do but to listen to his story and to suffer with him, to be reminded how dangerous intolerance can be. This is such a necessary story to be told, mainly at present times. We need to be constantly reminded by stories like these that you cannot give a voice to intolerant people. The fact that the board on that Tennessee school tried to remove this graphic novel from the curriculum only proves it. Everybody should read Maus. Every adult, teenager and child should read so we as a society can learn and remember. Unfortunately people have a short memory and if we are not constantly reminded of such atrocities and what intolerant people are capable of, we risk going into it once again. We need to always be reminded of history so that we can prevent it from happening again. It is a sad realization but this is just what human nature is. Read Maus.