Voices in the Dark

by Ulli Lust, Marcel Beyer (From an Idea by), John Brownjohn (Translator), Nika Knight (Translator)

Overview

Germany, in the final years of the Third Reich. Hermann Karnau is a sound engineer obsessed with recording the human voice in all its variations—the rantings of leaders, the roar of crowds, the rasp of throats constricted in fear—and indifferent to everything else. Employed by the Nazis, his assignments take him to Party rallies, to the Eastern Front, and into the household of Joseph Goebbels. There he meets Helga, the eldest daughter: bright, good-natured, and just beginning to suspect the horror that surrounds her...

Based on an acclaimed novel by Marcel Beyer, Voices in the Dark is the first fictional graphic novel by Ulli Lust, whose award-winning graphic memoir Today Is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life appeared in English in 2013. It is the story of an unlikely friendship and of a childhood betrayed, a grim parable of naïveté and evil, and a vivid, unsettling masterpiece.

This NYRC edition is a trade paperback and features full color throughout and new English hand-lettering.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781681371054
Publisher:	New York Review Books
Publication date:	10/17/2017
Pages:	368
Product dimensions:	6.70(w) x 9.40(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Ulli Lust’s acclaimed graphic memoir Today Is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life was called a “sprawling, meditative graphic novel [that] ripples with exuberance” by The New York Times. Her published work includes pieces of comics journalism as well as erotic-mythological poems, and she runs the online publishing company www.electrocomics.com. She was born in Vienna and lives and works in Berlin.

Marcel Beyer is an award-winning German novelist and poet. His 1995 novel Flughunde, upon which Ulli Lust’s graphic novel is based, was translated in 1997 as The Karnau Tapes. He is a visiting professor at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland.

John Brownjohn has translated over 160 books, including works by Willy Brandt, Hans Hellmut Kirst, and Walter Moers.

Nika Knight is a writer and translator of German literature, most recently Svenja Leiber’s novel The Last Country (2015).

Editorial Reviews

…[a] controlled, eccentric adaptation of a 1995 German novel by Marcel Beyer…Lust counterposes the children's genteel hiking trips and war games with the atrocities Karnau dispassionately documents, drawing both narrators' segments to emphasize visual details over their context.

The New York Times Book Review - Douglas Wolk

★ 08/14/2017
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. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

"A daring and ambitious graphic novel.” —Rachel Cooke, The Guardian

"Lust, author of the acclaimed graphic memoir Today Is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life, turns The Karnau Tapes, Marcel Beyer’s chronicle of a quirky, Nazi-employed sound engineer who befriends a daughter of Joseph Goebbels, into a completely sui generis work: a masterpiece in faded hues, expressionistic pen strokes, and panels laid out to amplify a painful story." —Boris Kachka, Vulture.com (New York Magazine)

"Following her award-winning graphic novel memoir Today Is the Last 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….It’s a rare adaptation that, rather than simply transcribing the source material, transcends it." —Publishers Weekly, starred review

"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.'...The illustration style and muted color palette (like an aged newspaper) achieve a haunting realism despite cartoonish exaggeration and expressionistic flourishes. Stunning." —Kirkus, starred review

“Ulli Lust really nails my favorite part of storytelling… the small details that create great character." —Jaime Hernandez, author of Love and Rockets

From the Publisher

★ 2017-08-06
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.

Kirkus Reviews