What is Stephen Harper Reading?
Book Number 12: Maus, by Art Spiegelman
Dedication:
To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
This most disturbing and necessary book,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel
Letter:
The Right Honourable Stephen Harper
Prime Minister of Canada
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa ON K1A 0A2
Dear Mr. Harper,
I am sorry but you will have to endure this time a letter written in my terrible handwriting. I didn’t manage to find a
printer in Oswiecim, the small Polish town where I’m staying at the moment.
Oswiecim is better known by the name the Germans gave it: AUSCHWITZ. Have you been?
I am here trying to finish my next book. And it also explains my choice of the latest book I am sending you: the graphic
novel MAUS, by ART SPIEGELMAN. Don’t be fooled by the format. This comic book is real literature.
Some stories need to be told in many different ways so that they will exist in new ways for new generations. The story
of the murder of nearly six million of Europe’s Jewish people at the hand of the Nazis and their criminal accomplices is
just the sort of story that needs renewing if we don’t want a part of ourselves to fall asleep, like grandchildren nodding
off after hearing grandfather repeat the same story of yore one time too many.
I know I said I would send you books that would increase your “stillness”. But a sense of peace and calm focus, of what
Buddhists call “passionate detachment”, must not fall into self-satisfaction or complacency. So a disturbance—and
Auschwitz is profoundly disturbing—can be the right way to renew one’s stillness.
MAUS is a masterpiece. Spiegelman tells his story, or, more accurately, the story of his father and mother, in a bold and
radical way. It’s not just that he takes the graphic form, thought perhaps by some to be a medium only for children, to
new artistic heights by taking on such a momentous topic as EXTERMINATIONIST genocide. It’s more than that. It’s how
he tells the story. You will see. The narrative agility and ease of it. And how the frames speak LARGE. Some, small
though they are, and in black and white, have an impact that one would think possible only with large paintings or shots
from a movie.
And I haven’t even mentioned the main device, which explains the title of the book: all the characters have the heads of
one kind of animal or other. So the Jews have the heads of mice, the Germans of cats, the Poles of pigs, the Americans
of dogs, and so on.
It’s brilliant. It so takes you in, it so rips you apart. From there you must make your own tricky way back again to what it
means to be human.
Yours truly,
Yann Martel
encl: one inscribed trade paperback book
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