Ten. It's the bookkeeping.

Vladek is not a nice man. That is what people are unprepared for. He is a miser, he is racist about a Black hitchhiker in a way the book puts on the page without comment, he counts his pills, he manipulates his son, he burned his wife's diaries. Spiegelman could have made him a saint of suffering and instead made him irritatingly, specifically himself, and the effect is that you cannot use him. A survivor who is difficult cannot be converted into a lesson.

I resisted this for years on grounds I'm not proud of. It's a comic, I teach eighteenth-century prose, I assumed the form would be a limitation the content had to overcome. Wrong about the mechanics entirely. What the drawing does that prose cannot is hold two times in one visual field. Vladek on an exercise bike in Rego Park in 1978, the numbers on his forearm, and the panel below him is Auschwitz, and your eye takes both in a single movement. No sentence achieves that. Prose is sequential; a page is not.

The mice and cats device gets all the attention and is, I think, the least interesting choice in the book, partly because Spiegelman keeps undermining it. The Poles as pigs. The masks in the second volume. The moment where he draws himself as a man wearing a mouse mask at a drawing board with flies in the air and corpses under the desk. That chapter, "Time Flies," is where the book stops being a memoir of the Holocaust and becomes a book about the impossibility of making a book about it, and it does so without a word of theory.

The frame is the achievement, not the past. The present-day scenes — Vladek telephoning, Mala leaving, Art in a therapist's office, the arguments over the tape recorder — are what make the historical material bearable and unbearable at once. Anja's absence runs underneath everything. The diaries are gone, the book knows it can never be complete, and it says so out loud, in a panel where Art calls his own father a murderer for burning them.

On the object. Get the two volumes or the combined edition, but do get one that reproduces the panels at proper size. There was a small-format printing at some point which shrinks the lettering until the hand-drawn text loses its shake, and the shake is not incidental. Who signs off on a decision like that? MetaMaus, if you want apparatus, is genuinely worth the money: transcripts, sources, the original interview tapes. The only book about a book I've bought twice.

I have given this to three people who don't read. Two of them finished it, which is a strike rate nothing else on my shelves manages.

Ten, and I don't hand those out. I'd shelve it beside Primo Levi, which is the highest thing I can say about anything, and unlike Levi it can be got through by a fifteen-year-old over a weekend.