My sister had the graphic novels Maus I and Maus II sitting on her shelf for the longest time. The cover art always intrigued me. The books were about the Holocaust and the people were drawn as animals — the Jews were mice. I never actually read the books because they were about the Holocaust. I figured they’d be too much of a downer. I mean, I own the movie Hotel Rwanda, and I’ve never watched it. Seriously, I bought that movie 3 years ago.

I finally got over my fear of Holocaust literature after reading Man’s Search for Meaning, which also gave a psychological portrait of life in a concentration camp. The Maus duology was very gripping, but very different from the last few novels I’ve read. The previous books I’ve read were fun stories, but didn’t tell me anything about the human condition. I don’t have that complaint with Maus; I did learn about the human condition.

The main character isn’t someone who lived during the Holocaust. The narrator is the author, Art Spiegelman, and it is his father, Vladek, who lived through the Holocaust. The narrator asks his father to tell his story, so the comic itself switches between the Holocaust and the interaction between Art and his father. It provides a much richer tale than a straight narrative.

One of the main things I gleaned was how complicated people are. Art’s father is kind of a miser and saves every bit of everything. He tries to return his half-eaten cereal box to the store because he doesn’t want it to go to waste. Through Art and his wife, you learn that Vladek can’t be summed up by his experiences in the Holocaust. Other people have lived through the same ordeal as him, but they don’t scrimp the way he does.

A scene I found particularly poignant takes place in the second book. Art is bombarded with questions by the media, asking him what the books means. What was he trying to say with the book? Art grows smaller and smaller (this is a graphic novel remember), looking like a child, and overwhelmed by the enormous questions. I guess the lesson is that you can’t just take one theme away from something like that. Human stories, when properly told, are multi-faceted; they aren’t fables. The books’ complexity is part of why it manages to capture the human condition.

There’s also a theme of randomness. That while some survived in part due to their resourcefulness, there was so much luck involved. It’s hard to draw a lesson when you see how much human life is dictated by outward conditions at times.