Dark Matters

I was somewhat taken aback by the final pages of Joseph Campbell's Oriental Mythology. After some interesting stuff about Japanese mythological thought and the practice of Shinto he takes a sudden diversion into various atrocities committed by the Chinese communists in Nepal, post-Second World War. They made for very uncomfortable reading and I'm not entirely sure what they had to do with notions of shared mythological tropes.

After closing the volume I decided it was time to treat myself to my first purchase of a book for 2018, this coming in the form of Art Spiegelman's Maus, which I've been intending to get hold of for the longest time. We took Zahira to the Kinokuniya at KLCC after our arrival here to buy some suitable tomes for her to read, so I grabbed a copy of the Complete Maus, incorporating both volumes I and II, and I read it in just a couple of days. Distinctly unputdownable, but inevitably a dark read, dealing as it does with the writer's parents' experience of the Holocaust and his own efforts to deal with this personal history.

Spiegelman's father, Vladek, is a quite extraordinary character. In many ways he's the ultimately difficult, grumpy old man as Artie tries to cope with him in the final years of his life, and attempts to get from him the story of himself and Anja and their imprisonment in and survival of Auschwitz. And in many ways he's the typical survivor, yet you're always aware that surviving had more to do with simple, inexplicable luck than anything else. Indeed, it seems extraordinary that the much more fragile Anja also made it through - only to commit suicide years later, something that is never dealt with in any kind of direct way in the narrative.

It's the particularity of their story that makes the graphic novel work. Yes, it's a Holocaust narrative, but it's a reminder that every individual's experience of that greater, dark narrative was distinct to themselves. And, of course, most of those narratives terminated tragically early.