Maus: A Survivor’s Tale

 Art Spiegelman, 1991 (May 2014)

 I avoided reading this book for a long time because I thought I’d heard enough stories about surviving the Holocaust. And the idea of reducing it to a story of cats and mice did not seem appealing. Probably I would not have read it had Spiegelman not been the subject of a feature show at the Vancouver Art Gallery where I was intrigued enough to pick up the book. Nevertheless, I found the story compelling at several levels.

  As a personal tale of survival, the story that Art Spiegelman’s father, Vladek, tells his son is extraordinary – the schemes to get through the early years of Nazi-occupied Poland, the trade-offs in the concentration camp and extermination camp, the forced march and train transport, the German death camp, these are hard enough to imagine, but Vladek’s ingenuity in finding ways to gain enough advantage to survive shows his forceful and resourceful personality. The fact that his wife, Anja (whom he portrays as more feeble), survives as well, while all of their family are killed, is even more extraordinary. Discovering the details of how an individual survives under such extreme circumstances is an interesting story in itself.

  On another level is the psychological impact of the story on the survivors. We know that Vladek’s strong personality is key to his survival (although we know little about how Anja survives). It’s not surprising that this takes a warped form when his son Art knows him as a demanding, bullying tyrant who scrimps and hoards even after building a secure and comfortable life in the USA. Anja commits suicide when Art is in his 20s, and Vladek seems to have an intolerable relationship with his new wife, Mala. (He seems paranoid and misreads Mala’s motives as venal, which leads one to wonder about his characterization of Anja, too.) Of course, Art finds him impossible to live with, or even visit, but he is drawn to his father out of a sense of loyalty or guilt, and wants to understand Vladek’s story. He presents the story and his reaction to it in an unadorned way as if he understands little beyond the surface, with little comment beyond his own editing of the story and his frustration in trying to capture it.

  While initially I felt that the drawing style was simple and crude, the imagery does add a great deal to the story line, making it both concrete and abstract at the same time. The horrors are expressed economically, showing the details without extensive description, but they still require an act of imagination on the part of the reader to make them meaningful. The animal characters are highly arbitrary and sometimes troubling (Poles as pigs? French as frogs?). If they make it easier for some readers to approach the topic, then perhaps that is sufficient justification, but it’s hard to avoid stereotypical characterizations and a fairy-tale-like story.

  And while this is an attempt to record a specific historical event, the animal story seems to take it out of any historical context. Certainly there is no attempt to describe the social and political context of Europe in the 1930s and 40s, and this is just a story of one person’s experience and how it marked him. I suppose other books have to describe the context, but in a sense this just becomes a bogey-man story of good animals and bad ones when the story is decontextualized in this way.

  This is a worthy and compelling story, but it raises questions about historical story-telling which may be as valuable as the story itself.

The Man Who Went Up in Smoke

Maj Sjöwall, Per Wahlöö (trans: Joan Tate), 1966 (May 2014)

  Combining the everyday drudgery of police detective work with the daily life of a police detective who has a hard time making the two fit together was, according to the notes, a departure for the genre in the 1960s. Certainly this novel, interesting if low key, is far from the English parlour detectives or the hardboiled American ones. By comparison with the flawed detectives of modern fiction, this is a slow, even plodding, story, although filled with detail that seems typical for the times. The procedural and psychological detail gives the story interest, in spite of its lack of action. Instead of a gruelling cross-examination, for example, the detectives sit in the suspect’s room for half an hour saying nothing, as the suspect grows increasingly nervous and finally accepts that he has to explain what he did. Since most criminals are not masterminds, I think that is a more likely outcome in the circumstances than the notion of a criminal toying with the detectives, leaving clues or holding out until the lawyer comes to save him.

  I thought the homey details were interesting – ironically, except for the place names, the Stockholm scenes could have been taking place in London or its suburbs. However, the picture of Budapest, an urbane tourist destination even under the Stalinist regime of the 1960s, with an efficient and helpful police department, was slightly surprising (possibly because of the authors’ Marxist interests). They make Budapest seem more attractive than Stockholm, which perhaps it is.

  Another reflection of the authors’ Marxist thinking lies in the crime and the perpetrators. There are no clever criminals here, just an unlikeable victim who got pretty much what he deserves, and a bunch of ordinary, competent people who get caught up in some unplanned violence. This is what the vast majority of crime involves. The attention that crime writers give to masterminds and elites reflects their own job as entertainers, and I do find it absurd and a little tiresome when improbable criminals are the main focus of crime writing. Interestingly, a theme in some modern crime fiction is not so much the elites committing crimes against each other, but the crimes perpetrated through pharmaceutical or industrial companies to generate wealth for the elites. Such stories, however, reflect a contemporary sentiment of mistrust against corporate elites rather than a mistrust of the corporate system. Sjöwall and Wahlöö seem to be more interested in exploring the circumstances of realistic crime and how decent, self-respecting police officers respond to it.

 It will be interesting to see what themes they develop in their other novels.