Building Stories by Chris Ware

Publisher: Jonathan Cape Books
ISBN: 9780224078122
Format: Boxset containing hardbacks, paperbacks, pamplets, etc
Genre: Graphic Novel
Pages: 260
Publication Date: October 4, 2012

SYNOPSIS

In Chris Ware's own words, 'Building Stories follows the inhabitants of a three-flat Chicago apartment house: a thirty-year-old woman who has yet to find someone with whom to spend the rest of her life; a couple who wonder if they can bear each other's company for another minute; and finally an elderly woman who never married and is the building's landlady...'

The scope, the ambition, the artistry and emotional heft of this project are beyond anything even Chris Ware has achieved before.

REVIEW

This is my first real introduction to the work of Chris Ware. I've admired his previous books, especially the Acme Novelty Library series, from afar but I haven’t been brave enough to read one yet. At first glance they appear too daunting to just slip into. While lovely to look at, there is a lot of information for your retinas to process; panels and faces filled the pages from top to bottom and tiny font filled in all the remaining gaps. They always left me feeling a bit intimidated and mildly confused about how to decipher a path through the colourful mazes. To me, they seemed like mystifying logic puzzles in image form that I would one day work up the courage to work through.

Building Stories is his latest work, a graphic novel comprising of 14 distinctive printed works ranging from magazines, broadsheets, flip books and pamphlets. This unconventional 'book in a box' is the most fun and unique book format I've ever had the pleasure of coming across. When you slowly lift the lid off the container and cast your gaze over the assortment of colourful treats, it fills you with childish glee. There are papers and booklets of all sizes and shapes and it’s impossible not to feel a little excitement at the sense of wonder and discovery.

Building Stories in all it's glory...

The order in which you chose to assemble your narrative is entirely up to you. The stories are intricately connected and span over a time period of 2 to 3 decades, so there is a reading order in a sense since the passing of time is clearly visible for some characters, but each piece can be tackled in any order. In a way, I think it adds to the charm of the book. I like to imagine that if I pass this onto others they might end up following a different path from mine and may come out feeling differently about certain events or the whole book altogether if they manage to finish on a more uplifting segment than I did.

The craftsmanship behind each item and the intricate details contained in each colourful panel are some of the most impressive design work I've come across. The amount of meticulous precision, consuming passion and painstaking planning that has gone into the construction and execution of this enormous project is staggering. There’s actually no need to read through the text contained in most of the booklets, it’s an absolute marvel to look at. It somehow manages to defy logic and appear to be both densely packed without looking cluttered and rigid yet strangely chaotic all at the same time.

Building Stories has left me feeling divided. While I think that it’s a masterpiece and an instant classic for its genre, I'm not sure how much I truly enjoyed the stories it contained. It’s odd for me to absolute adore the aesthetics, but slightly loathe the unrelenting bleakness that surrounds the multiple storylines explored in this collection. Surprisingly, this is not a condemning statement to make about this compilation. Chris Ware has written himself on the back of the box that “this book is sure to sympathize with the crushing sense of life wasted, opportunities missed and creative dreams dashed”, so readers are warned in advance of the general sense of melancholy that characterizes this visual novel.


Most of my discomfort lies in the voyeuristic nature of this piece of work. It’s similar to the uncomfortable feeling you get living in a flat with paper thin walls and involuntarily overhearing a loud argument from your neighbours next door, only a thousand times worse. In this case, not only are you listening in to conversations and arguments about a range of personal and highly sensitive topics, but you’re also watching the whole thing in vivid detail, like an invisible occupant in the room perceiving the devastating effects of those string of insults and the instant remorse that flickers across the faces of characters who come to the realization that they can’t take back the harmful words.

Ware’s natural ability to empathize with his characters is remarkable. He gives voice to the insecurities and sometimes awkward socially unacceptable ideas and thoughts that crosses all of our minds, whether we like to admit it or not. All this is handled with a deft touch that allows us to sympathize with the characters without making them despicable. There were many moments where I cringed at certain storylines, but I had to stop myself and ask was it really because it’s so truly a horrid thought to have about another person or was it because there’s a small part of myself that recognized I would be a hypocrite for damning the character when I myself could easily have had a similar thought?

My favourite piece is the large blue accordion style booklet. On one side, it shows a meticulously drafted layout of each floor of the brownstone apartment with skilfully added touches of life like the addition of dirty laundry on the floor, stubborn old crumbs hidden behind couches and a small collection of dried leaves blown against the front doors. Those little details, so cleverly thought out, serve to create an inviting environment that our eyes can roam and explore out of what normally would be a very sterile and pristine architectural diagram devoid of occupants and colour.

I remember looking at the open fallen book on the floor of one of the bedrooms and thinking how badly I wanted to pick that up because it’ll crack the spine if it’s left like that (Yes, I'm one of THOSE people). Oh the horror! I think the brilliance of that piece is that even though the images contain no people, we still can find something familiar to identify with.

In contrast, the other side is brimming with small vibrantly coloured comics portraying the hidden thoughts and interactions between the residents of the building. Consisting of 4 panels, each with a fixed view of the front of the brownstone building in one season, it serves both as a backdrop for these little episodes and gives a sense of passing time. This booklet doesn't drive the story along like some of the others do, but that’s why I found it refreshing. It wasn't an emotionally charged episode or a bitter-sweet look into the past, it’s just a cleverly constructed and amusing glimpse into the lives of these characters.

While I admire Chris Ware for not shying away from the difficult and often mishandled topics of isolation, depression and the paralysing effect of losing yourself in thoughts of the past, I constantly found myself hoping against hope that the next booklet I picked up would contain a happier outcome for the protagonists.

In a previous post, I talked about picture books being an unappreciated and underrated form of storytelling. Comics and graphic novels are another genre that is greatly ignored in many literary circles. Hopefully, the addition of two graphic novels to this year’s Costa Award shortlist will go a long way to help the image that graphic novels are respectable forms of pictorial literature.

I think many individuals don’t know how to approach reading a graphic novel and that can be a bit intimidating or off putting. There are a few people that I know personally who hold the opinion that graphic novels aren't a valid form of literature because they consist mainly of images and sometimes sparse use of text. I don’t think they’re giving them a fair chance. Graphic novels require a different approach to reading than that of a normal novel. Traditional books rely on our ability to associate the words on a page with our own experiences; to use our own imagination to conjure up every single item described in the book from the features of a character to the ominous shadows lurking in the cobbled streets found in the setting. With graphic novels, there’s less of a need for that, the images for the most part are provided there for you, but that doesn't mean there is less there for you to “read”.

Visual interpretation is needed to read the expressions on character faces and the subtle body language that instinctively shapes the course of most our social interactions. The slumping of shoulders, raising of eyebrows, the pursing of lips; these are all familiar sights in our day to day lives that help us to read the moods and intentions of the people around us. Instead of being utterly dependant on the author’s words and descriptions, we have to rely on our own ability to identify the signs hinted at by the artist in the splashes of colour and deliberate scribbles of ink. Chris Ware describes it as “the weird process of reading pictures, not just looking at them.” As we “experience the world as adults; we don’t really “see” any more after a certain age, we spend our time naming and categorizing and identifying and figuring how everything all fits together.” This reliance on our sense of sight and interpretation of images is what sets it uniquely apart from other formats.

It’s hard to give a proper rating or even a general recommendation to strangers for this collection. I can say without fear that this is a work of genius and many reviewers are already justifiably proclaiming this project as Chris Ware’s magnum opus, but I can’t say that it will hold universal appeal to everyone who picks it up. It provides a unique reading experience like no other that I've come across and that’s well worth the exploration since there is no guarantee that anything will come along that will provide the same sensation. I've opened the box over a dozen of times to pull out pieces to examine while I was writing this review and the novelty of opening up this huge box full of tiny books still hasn't worn off.

There are a lot of people who will be instantly put off by the seriousness of the issues tackled and the downbeat tone and that’s perfectly understandable, but to those of you that decide to take the chance and embark on the journey, I recommend sticking with it to the end. It’s deeply affecting, offering a lasting impression of ups and downs of living a modern life.

There’s no real conclusion to the multiple storylines in Building Stories; no happy endings for its inhabitants, but that’s the point. It’s a depiction of life in its rawest form: full of regret, haunting memories, failed dreams, unsaid desires, fleeting happiness, lingering sadness and flickers of hope. Giving these characters endings aren't necessary, their lives are still in motion; their fates undetermined. What we are left with instead are our reflections on our own lives and the loud, clear message to go out and live them.

Short and Sweet: The Twitter Review

A decade in the making, Building Stories is an ingenuous work of beauty and quality. A truly unique reading experience that shouldn't be missed.