Publisher's Weekly Review
Lust's intimate and imaginative follow-up graphic memoir to her Ignatz award-winning punk travelogue Today Is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life picks up when she is an unemployed and uncertain 20-something mother. Early on, the structure meanders along with Ulli's life choices: she bounces back and forth between Vienna and the countryside, where her son lives with her parents, and between dating an older actor, Georg, and her working-class Nigerian boyfriend, Kimata. Georg is okay with the arrangement, but Kimata claims, "I'm an African man. I can't be with a woman who loves two men." Ulli waits out his tortured rages with cool avoidance; then it's back to sex. When Kimata's angst takes a violent turn, the political and cultural forces that seemed like background noise come into sharp, painful focus: 1980s and '90s Austria may be a place where health insurance flows like water, but it also treats immigrants and domestic violence survivors with tragic disdain. Lust tells her story as she draws it: straightforward, detailed, and explicit. Her black-and-white line drawings, spot-colored with pink, are chock-full with penises, hairy vulvas, and joyously fanciful backdrops. Lust's frank rendition makes plain how passions (both artistic and bodily) may inspire horrible decision-making, but they can also drive people to figure out who they truly are. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Picking up after the events of her award-winning graphic memoir, Today Is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life (2009), Lust recounts her days as an anti-bourgeois anarchist in 1990s Vienna, cluelessly but readily seeking artistic and sexual fulfillment. After she and her boyfriend, Georg, an actor 20 years older, decide to have a sexually open relationship, Lust embarks on an intensely erotic affair (rendered in explicit detail) with Kimata, a Nigerian immigrant. What begins as an idyllic ménage à trois inevitably becomes problematic as his cultural mores incite Kimata's jealousy, and the sex turns dangerously violent. In contrast to the formal experimentation of her novel-adaptation, Voices in the Dark (2017), Lust presents her own story with a straightforward graphic approach; her two-colored drawings are loose, rough, and a bit naive, just like her younger-self protagonist. Lust's bluntly honest account grants us a look at a courageous but alarming life that few would want to experience but are pruriently amenable to observing from a distance.--Gordon Flagg Copyright 2019 Booklist
