The Holocaust isn’t a topic one can imagine being represented in the form of talking animals à la Micky Mouse really. However, Art Spiegelman did exactly that. He depicted his father Valdek’s, life as a Polish Jew in Nazi concentration camps and as a Holocaust survivor in the 1991 graphic novel, Maus. The book can be and has been described as fitting into various genres including memoir, biography, history, fiction and even autobiography as Spiegelman’s own life with his father and in the process of writing the novel is also recounted. It was the first graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize. The biographical events leading up to and during WW2 are framed by Spiegelman’s own process in obtaining the information from his father through various visits and interviews in the late 70s. In this layer of the story the relationship between father and son are greatly explored including the impact of Spiegelman’s mother’s suicide 20 years earlier had on her remaining family. The idea of publicizing his and his wife’s lives wasn’t one that Spiegelman’s father necessarily agreed with and so to not overdramatize their story he decided on portraying them in a very classic cartoonish form, he expressed the Jews as mice (a depiction featured in Nazi propaganda) and the Nazis as cats. Other nationalities/races were given other animals such as the Polish as pigs and the Americans as dogs. This representation made it more accessible to readers to empathise with the protagonists due to the cat-chases-mouse metaphor as well as very harshly yet truthfully representing how race was classified at the time and how one was defined by it. It would have been horrifying to show images of hanged people or piles of human corpses but using his anthropomorphic representation Spiegelman could illustrate facial expressions and body language in great detail while still ensuring that his book could be read by a large audience. What makes his portrayal of his parent’s nightmarish lives so original is not only his format but also how he tells the story. The language is crisp and to the point, without any colourful metaphors or other literary antiques. He uses onomatopoeia as do most comic/graphic novel artist and these swirl around the pages give a gruelling description of events. The story doesn’t need exaggerations or fancy little flounces, it is graphic enough. Even his ‘present day’ framework story continues in this tone, utterly factual and brutally honest rendition of his father, he isn’t some wartime hero because he survived the tortures of Auschwitz; he is an old man who isn’t exactly loved. He is a frugal, bigoted, manipulative and unappreciative yet these are the qualities with which he survived. He was often racist and couldn’t stand being compared to African-Americans. The story is memorable, such scenes as two hanged ‘men’ on a market square and others walking by every day, or Spiegelman himself, being interviewed by journalists on the second volume of the novel, a human but wearing a mouse mask, hiding behind the story of his parents. He blends his present with his fathers past seamlessly, with the effect being similar to that of a story with a duel point of view, one can never wait till the next chapter with that setting/character pops up again. The novel wasn’t flawless, the one issue I had was the animal metaphor. By stating that all Germans are cats and all Jews mice he seems to have oversimplified, not every German was a Nazi and not every individual incarcerated identified as Jewish first or at all. The metaphor doesn’t seem explored enough, with the diversity of the animals at hand the story seemed a bit reduced to its essentials. Nevertheless Maus is an exceptional re-telling of history and its unique format paved the way for graphic memoirs in the English-speaking world as well as for comics and graphic novels world wide. It is a wonderful text accessible to readers of various ages and different cultures.