Voices in the Dark

Starred review from August 14, 2017
Following her award-winning graphic novel memoir Today Is the First Day of the Rest of Your Life, Lust adapts The Karnau Tapes, Beyer’s dense, dark novel set during the collapse of the Third Reich. She is more than up to the task, transmuting the material with visual imagination and insight. The narrative switches between two small cogs in the relentless machinery of the Reich: Hermann Karnau, a sound engineer who progresses from arranging the speakers at Nazi rallies to conducting bizarre aural experiments on concentration camp prisoners, and Helga, the eldest daughter of Joseph Goebbels, who, along with her siblings, is destined to be murdered by her parents in Hitler’s bunker. Lust’s loose, deceptively simple art, tinted in washes of faded color, creates a mood of deepening claustrophobia as the complicit Karnau and the innocent Helga descend toward the same fate. It’s a rare adaptation that, rather than simply transcribing the source material, transcends it.

Starred review from August 15, 2017
A peculiar man obsessed with the human voice and the preteen daughter of a Nazi propagandist cross paths during the later stages of World War II: Austrian cartoonist Lust's (The Big Feminist But, 2014, etc.) first graphic novel is an adaptation of Marcel Beyer's novel The Karnau Tapes (1995).Hermann Karnau has been fascinated by sound since he was a young boy savoring the silence of early mornings (before it was ruined by "imperious voices" and "clamor and commotion"), and this aural obsession eventually leads him to audio engineering work for the Third Reich. While recording radio propaganda at the home of a Nazi officer--a never-named Joseph Goebbels--Karnau begins a friendship with the man's six children, particularly the oldest, Helga, who notices troubling incongruities between the world her parents portray to her and the world she directly observes. Karnau and Helga alternate narration, with Karnau indulging his obsession with perverse experiments and dissections in search of the bloody biology behind voice and sound and Helga growing aware of the lies and ugliness propping up her life of privilege and luxury, especially as the Soviet advance sends her and her siblings into a crumbling bunker with the retreating Nazi elite--where her parents' words of reassurance are increasingly betrayed by the desperation they can't keep from physically manifesting. The book is troubling and profound, with characters driven to find truths that ultimately prove devastating. Lust's clean, confident lines richly convey everything from a child's discomfort with a haircut to a dog's eagerness to play to Karnau's sheer bliss from a "quivering glottis." Lust's inventive paneling both offers diagrammatic images to underscore Karnau's reductive mind and, combined with onomatopoeic captions, deftly ratchets the tension. The illustration style and muted color palette (like an aged newspaper) achieve a haunting realism despite cartoonish exaggeration and expressionistic flourishes. Stunning.

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November 15, 2017
Lust follows her award-winning graphic memoir Today Is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life (2009) with an ambitious comics adaptation of a novel by German writer Marcel Beyer, which powerfully juxtaposes heedless evil and naive innocence. Hermann Karnau, a sound engineer working for the Third Reich, progresses from engineering the sound at rallies to conducting grisly experiments on the vocal chords of concentration-camp prisoners. Karnau's work puts him in contact with Joseph Goebbels, leading to an unlikely friendship with the propaganda minister's young daughter Helga. Lust conveys the story through alternating first-person accounts narrated by the pair; the visual depiction of Karnau's callous rise through the Reich's hierarchy is formally audaciousbefitting Karnau's profession, Lust is particularly effective at integrating the dialogue and sound effects with the graphicscontrasting with her relatively straightforward treatment of Helga's growing awareness of the war's barbarity. Their stories converge in Hitler's underground bunker in the final days of the Reich. The respective fates of the two protagonists provide a poignant end to this devastating work.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)