When Ulli, a punked-out and disaffected seventeen-year-old from a middle-class Viennese family, sets off on her trip, she doesn’t have a particular destination in mind. Ulli Lust’s graphic memoir of the time she spent hitchhiking and otherwise relying on the kindness of strangers in Austria and Italy makes little pretense of caring about the locales.
A travelogue is ultimately a coming-of-age story with its thumb stuck out. The real story being told has to with the self and its tentative steps into some great unknown. I would think a degree of apprehension normal for a first-time visitor.Call it the travelogue paradox: In books that purport to be about the perils and pleasures of life on the road, travel itself is typically no more than pretext. On one of the first pages I read: 'Well, Köln is sizable, but is it a city in the modern sense? Our destination is certainly such a place. "Berlin" might be as good as 'Today as is the Last Day of the Rest of your Life'. The last graphic novel that made a huge impression on me was 'Today is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life' by Ulli Lust. (NRC Handelsblad.) It was unavailable in bookstores, she had to order it directly from the Canadian publishing house, but it arrived surprisingly fast in Amsterdam. Last night my girlfriend gave me "Berlin" after it was finally being reviewed in a Dutch newspaper. In the last pages, the book pitches suddenly, violently forward through time, as though to meet us - an ending so electrifying that I gasped,' Ed Park wrote in NYT in November 2018 about the graphic novel "Berlin" by Jason Lutes. It took me weeks to get through, at times backtracking in order to clarify who was who, always returning at last to a greater appreciation of Lutes’s vision and humanity.
(“I hated the lifetime of pain and struggle it took to create a thing that anyone could read in an hour,” sighs the cartoonist in Matthew Klam’s novel “Who Is Rich?”) Strange as it sounds, one of the virtues of “Berlin” is how it resists completion. 'The dirty secret about graphic novels is how fast they read it’s rare for one to require more than a day or two to finish.
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