Maus es la biografia de Vladek Spiegelman, un judio polaco superviviente de los campos de exterminio nazis, contada a traves de su hijo Art, un dibujante de comics que quiere dejar memoria de la aterradora persecucion que sufrieron millones de personas en la Europa sometida por Hitler y de las consecuencias de este sufrimiento en la vida cotidiana de las generaciones posteriores. Apartandose de las formas de literatura creadas hasta la publicacion de Maus, Art Spiegelman se aproxima al tema del Holocausto de un modo absolutamente renovador, y para ello relata la experiencia de su propia familia en forma de memoria grafica, utilizando todos los recursos estilisticos y narrativos tradicionales de este genero y, a la vez, inventando otros nuevos.

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION

A story of a Jewish survivor of Hitler’s Europe and his son, a cartoonist who tries to come to terms with his father’s 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. 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