John Whiston
Metamorphoses
Maus: A Survivor’s Tale
By Art Spiegelman
Pantheon 159pp $8.95
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
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?
From Aesop to Orwell animals have found themselves anthropomorphised into human types, cute or crude. Spiegelman takes this tradition to its extreme with the terrified appeal of his beady Jew-mice eyes, the mandarin claws of the Nazi-cats, the boorish herd-stupidity of the Polepigs: He has taken Hitler’s terrible assertion ‘the
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
Twitter Feed
Knowledge of Sufism increased markedly with the publication in 1964 of The Sufis, by Idries Shah. Nowadays his writings, much like his father’s, are dismissed for their Orientalism and inaccuracy.
@fitzmorrissey investigates who the Shahs really were.
Fitzroy Morrissey - Sufism Goes West
Fitzroy Morrissey: Sufism Goes West - Empire’s Son, Empire’s Orphan: The Fantastical Lives of Ikbal and Idries Shah by Nile Green
literaryreview.co.uk
Rats have plagued cities for centuries. But in Baltimore, researchers alighted on one surprising solution to the problem of rat infestation: more rats.
@WillWiles looks at what lessons can be learned from rat ecosystems – for both rats and humans.
Will Wiles - Puss Gets the Boot
Will Wiles: Puss Gets the Boot - Rat City: Overcrowding and Urban Derangement in the Rodent Universes of John B ...
literaryreview.co.uk
Twisters features destructive tempests and blockbuster action sequences.
@JonathanRomney asks what the real danger is in Lee Isaac Chung's disaster movie.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/eyes-of-the-storm