When twitter meets the holocaust
The bloggers behind Dublin Twook Club debate Spiegelman's masked mice characters in a classic autobiographical novel
This month's book-club pick is Maus: A Survivor's Tale by Art Spiegelman, published by Penguin.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Maus is an autobiography told in the graphic novel form. Parts of the story were originally published in RAW magazine between 1980 and 1991. The complete story was published in two volumes: the first in 1986 (entitled My Father Bleeds History), and the second in 1991 (And Here My Troubles Began). It recounts the struggle of Spiegelman's father Vladek to survive the Holocaust as a Polish Jew.
The book draws largely on his recollections of his experiences during wartime, and later in the Rego Park section of New York City. The book includes one of Spiegelman's earlier comics which recounts the events surrounding his mother's suicide. It also delves into his troubled relationship with his father, and the ways that the war reverberated through generations of the family.
All people are presented as anthropomorphic animals in Maus. For example, the Germans are presented as cats and all Jews are depicted as mice (hence the name 'Maus' which is 'mouse' in German).
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Art Spiegelman (pictured right) was born in Sweden in 1948 to Polish-Jewish refugees, but grew up in New York. At age 20, he suffered a nervous breakdown and spent time in a mental institution. Upon his release, Spiegelman became a major figure in the underground comic book movement of the 1970s, co-founding the San Francisco-based Arcade.
In 1980, Spiegelman started RAW magazine with his wife, Francoise Mouly. He also worked for the New Yorker and Harpers. For Maus, Spiegelman won a special Pulitzer Prize because board members couldn't classify the work.
ABOUT THE BOOK CLUB:
The Dublin Twook Club formed earlier this year, and indeed Maus was just their second ever book club meeting. The Twook Club is the brainchild of blogger couple Gav Reilly and Ciara Brennan. Every month, visitors to their website http://dublintwookclub.wordpress.com can pick and vote on a book choice, and the first dozen people to sign up (via their Twitter profiles) then read the book, and meet to discuss the choice. Each meeting is live-blogged on Twitter so that others can read and join in no matter where they are.
VERDICT:
Overall, Maus produced a huge response from the Twook Club, the majority of it positive, though the graphic novel format was new to most of them.
"I initially found the visual element very challenging and felt I had to multi-task," admits Ciara Brennan. "But there is some incredible imagery. The sequence, for example, where his parents are walking on a path shaped like a Swastika, is simple but really gets the image of the story across. I also loved hearing the Jewish dialect, with all its quirks and idiosyncrasies."
Sheila O'Kelly wasn't a fan of the format.
"I know everyone raves about it, but I found that using images distanced me from the story," she argues. "Language can be more effective when you have to create the pictures in your own mind. There's a slightly alarming graphic of a child being beaten against a wall, but the way it was depicted made it seem less rather than more, real."
Darragh Doyle found he couldn't put the book down once he started. "I tore through it in a night," he says. "I loved it. I don't think the story could be told any other way. I'm a big WWII nerd, and since I finished Maus, I've read three other WWII books. My interest is piqued now."
Online Twook Club members @EmilyAM (as she is known to fellow Twitterers) says: "I was very sceptical and had little interest in the graphic novel. But I went and bought it, read the next day, and got really into it. Once I started, it was no struggle. I pleasantly surprised about how the form lent itself to portraying the intricacies of the paternal relationship."
Indeed, several members of the club commented that the book is as much about the relationship between a father and son, as it is about war and the Final Solution.
"I think as much as he wanted to understand his dad, it was to understand himself as well, and needing to establish his father's identity and thus his own," says Ciara.
The choice of using animals to tell the story was also a big discussion point amongst the group. "I think it would have been too difficult to portray the emotion on human faces in the basic form it was drawn in," says Darragh.
Online member @helenmm adds: "I thought the weakest bits were where Spiegelman stepped outside of the animal metaphor and introduced humans (wearing masks, for example)."
NEXT MONTH'S BOOK-CLUB CHOICE: American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld.
If your book club would like to take part in our monthly book club feature, or if you are reading next month's choice and would like us to include your thoughts on the book, please contact dcashin@ independent.ie or Irish Independent Book Club, 27-32 Talbot St, Dublin 1.
- Declan Cashin
Irish Independent
