Today Is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life by Ulli Lust

Lacking the proper documents, the girls make their way to Italy surreptitiously. What she wants is to escape the boredom of bourgeois Austrian life and do as she pleases, “not what someone is telling to do.” And so, in the winter of 1984, she takes off for Italy with a girl named Edi, a nymphomaniac with no intuition or discernment. 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. (.) The result is a modern coming-of-age story that addresses the thrills and consequences of being young, idealistic, and more than a little lucky.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.

Lust's desire to experience real life and to learn things beyond books is by turns uplifting and painful, funny and frightening-and will probably make any stunt you pulled as a teenager look timid by comparison. Striking in its lack of reflective judgment or moralistic resolution, the book leaves the reader with the pure fluid exuberance and tested mettle of woman a gritty dharma bum. Winner of the 2013 Ignatz Award, it traces Lust's bracing, reality-laid-bare mid-'80s Italian trip as a penniless, punked-out Viennese teen trekking from Rome's Spanish Steps to some very dark corners of the cultural sould. the book ripples with exuberance: she convincingly evokes her teenage feelings of fury and joy, and the small details of the way she experienced unfamiliar places for the first time.Īs one of his final import gifts to the English-speaking-world, (.) Kim Thompson (R.I.P.) delivered a translation of this epic Austrian memoir. The New York Times on the original graphic novel:

WRITTEN BY ⎪ Roland Hablesreiter, Ulli Lust (graphic novel) Based on the graphic novel of the same title by Ulli Lust. The rebellious, 17-year-old, punked-out Ulli and her promiscuous devil-may-care friend Edi set out for a wild hitchhiking trip across Italy.

Today Is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life by Ulli Lust