Hi everyone
Book club no.31 took place yesterday at Flemming’s place in Fulham. A small but perfectly formed group of Flemming, Pete, Andy and Camilla dined on roast duck, roast potatoes and red cabbage and found time between delicious mouthfuls to discuss Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Complete Maus”, the first graphic novel the book club has considered.
The issue of the relationship between words and pictures, and how a graphic novel can represent the action normally found in a literary novel – let alone something as complex as the Holocaust – was the focus of our discussion. Camilla kicked off a close ‘reading’ of Spiegelman’s pictures by noting how the mice – representing the Jews – do not have mouths except in images of them in pain, and how this suggested their essential ‘voicelessness’. The group discussed the use of different animals to represent the different nationalities and to what extend this was a successful or distracting conceit.
Andy’s interest was in the use of time and how the format of the comic allowed the representation of time to be more fluid, so the narration could flit back and forth between the 1940s and 1980s in a way that, he felt, would have been much harder for a literary novel to achieve.
Pete highlighted how the portrayal of a Jewish father from that generation mirrorred similar stories by other Jewish writers, including memoirs by Philip Roth. Flemming pointed out that the book’s long gestation period (it was written while the author’s father was alive but not published till after his death) suggests Spiegelman struggled to escape his father’s presence. Pete noted the Freudian resonances that echoed throughout the book. Andy – as is required in every book club – discussed the presence of the mouse’s ego, superego and id in the narrative.
The group also discussed whether the book demeaned or suitably comemmorated Holocaust victims, whether it worked as fiction or biography, the effect of using real photos at different points in the book, the reason for the absence of the mother’s suicide, and the impact of the ‘interchapter’ of Spiegelman’s previous comic.
Overall, prejudices about graphic novels were successfully challenged and the group agreed that the experience of reading “Maus” had been overwhelmingly positive.
Having looked at the list I think it’s Sophie’s turn next.
Pete
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