Maus

Art Spiegelman (1991)
Maus is Spiegelman's description of his father's time in Auschwitz and other concentration camps, interspersed with commentary on the relationship between the father and son.
Touching, worthwhile and well written, it given some inkling of the savagery and brutality that occurrs in a situation when one group is labelled as subhuman.
The overwhelming brutality of the Holocaust is evident and yet simultaneously one is never wishing to stop reading. Moral ambiguity is touched upon more than once: is Spiegelman doing the right thing by profiting from the memory of the Shoah?
He also touches on the fact that those who perish cannot so easily have their story retold. The most notable part of this book is how clearly recognisably human all the characters seem: his father is not portrayed as a saint but a man put in an impossible situation, and a good man but with his own foibles: bad tempered, racism towards blacks.More quiestions are raised than answered, and my time spent in Rwanda has shown how hollow the notion of "never again" really has been.
One will hope that the brutality of the 21st century will be less severe than that of the 20th century, but the recent violence enacted by my own government in Iraq shows how fragile such a hope can be.