John Whiston
Metamorphoses
Maus: A Survivor’s Tale
By Art Spiegelman
Pantheon 159pp $8.95 order from our bookshop
The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals: The Lost History of Europe’s Animal Trials
By E P Evans
Faber & Faber 336pp £4.95 order from our bookshop
I hate cats, I have no particularly strong feelings about pigs and I am vaguely fond of mice. Presumably these are the emotions I am supposed to have towards the Nazis, Poles and Jews from Art Spiegelman’s unsettling comic book of the holocaust Maus. In a pictorial biography of his father, Spiegelman sends us scurrying through the doubts and dark alleys of pre-war Poland straight into the now deadening familiarity of the Nazi trap. There has been a bit of a hoo-hah about this book, with its critics claiming either that the depiction of the Jews as mice (and probably more offensively, the Poles as pigs) fosters rather than exposes racist leanings, or that the comic strip format per se trivialises the enormity of this century’s worst barbarism. Playing around with the holocaust can be a dangerous game. The recent Channel 4 film The Struggles for Poland landed itself in hot water by simply reminding us of the anti-semitism indigenous to pre-war Poland. So what is Spiegelman up to?
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Only in Britain, perhaps, could spy chiefs – conventionally viewed as masters of subterfuge – be so highly regarded as ethical guides.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-spy-who-taught-me
In this month's Bookends, @AdamCSDouglas looks at the curious life of Henry Labouchere: a friend of Bram Stoker, 'loose cannon', and architect of the law that outlawed homosexual activity in Britain.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-gross-indecency
'We have all twenty-nine of her Barsetshire novels, and whenever a certain longing reaches critical mass we read all twenty-nine again, straight through.'
Patricia T O'Conner on her love for Angela Thirkell. (£)
https://literaryreview.co.uk/good-gad