Two sittings. Then a week of not wanting to begin anything else.

The frame is what makes it work. Not the camps material, which would be devastating in any form, but the present-day sections: the old man on the exercise bike, counting his pills, being difficult about money, refusing to be a suitable subject. The book keeps cutting back to a son failing to interview his father properly — and that failure is left in, rather than tidied away.

Blue tab where he draws himself at the drawing board in a mouse mask, with the flies. That's the moment the device admits what it is, and it lands almost exactly halfway through the second volume, which can't be an accident.

Where the pink went: the animal scheme strains as soon as it has to handle nationality rather than persecution, he knows it strains, and knowing doesn't entirely fix it. There's a page where he says as much through his therapist, and I'm not sure the concession earns the problem away.

A nine. I counted the panels on the page where the mother's diaries are burned; there are seven, and they have stayed with me longer than most of the novels I got through this year.