Building Stories

by Chris Ware

After years of sporadic work on other books and projects and following the almost complete loss of his virility, it's here: a new graphic novel by Chris Ware.
 
Building Stories imagines the inhabitants of a three-story Chicago apartment building: a 30-something woman who has yet to find someone with whom to spend the rest of her life; a couple, possibly married, who wonder if they can bear each other's company another minute; and the building's landlady, an elderly woman who has lived alone for decades. Taking advantage of the absolute latest advances in wood pulp technology, Building Stories is a book with no deliberate beginning nor end, the scope, ambition, artistry and emotional prevarication beyond anything yet seen from this artist or in this medium, probably for good reason.

Genres: Graphic Novels, Comics, Fiction, Art, Graphic Novels Comics, Short Stories, Architecture

260 pages, Hardcover

First published October 2, 2012

About the author

Chris Ware is an American cartoonist acclaimed for redefining the visual and narrative possibilities of the graphic novel, known especially for his long-running Acme Novelty Library series and major works including Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth, Building Stories, and Rusty Brown. His work is distinguished by its emotional depth, frequently exploring loneliness, memory, regret, and the quieter forms of pain that shape ordinary lives, rendered with extreme visual precision, intricate page designs, and a style that evokes early twentieth-century American illustration, advertising, and architecture. Raised in Omaha and later based in the Chicago area, Ware first attracted attention through his strips for The Daily Texan, where an invitation from Art Spiegelman to contribute to Raw helped encourage him toward an ambitious, self-publishing approach that would define his career. Acme Novelty Library disrupted conventions of comic book production in both format and tone, presenting characters such as Quimby the Mouse and later Rusty Brown in narratives that blend autobiography, satire, and psychological portraiture. Building Stories further expanded his formal experimentation, released as a boxed set of interconnected printed pieces that require the reader to assemble meaning from varied physical formats. Ware’s artistic influences range from early newspaper cartoonists like Winsor McCay and Frank King to the collage and narrative play of Joseph Cornell, and he has spoken about using typography-like logic in his drawing to mirror the fragmented, associative way memory works. His practice remains largely analog, relying on hand drawing and careful layout, though he uses computers for color preparation. Ware has also been active as an editor, designer, and curator, contributing to volumes reprinting historic comic strips, serving as editor of The Best American Comics 2007, and organizing exhibitions such as UnInked at the Phoenix Art Museum. His work has extended into multimedia collaborations, including illustrated documentary materials for This American Life and visual designs for film posters, book covers, and music projects. His later projects include The Last Saturday, serialized online for The Guardian, and Monograph, a retrospective volume combining autobiography with archival material. Widely recognized for his influence, Ware’s books have received numerous honors, including multiple Eisner and Harvey Awards, and Jimmy Corrigan became the first graphic novel to win the Guardian First Book Award. He has exhibited at major institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art and Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and his contributions to the medium have led many peers and critics to regard him as one of the most significant cartoonists of his generation.

Reviews

[Dave Schaafsma · Rating 5 out of 5]

6/1/12: I just finished this brilliant, brilliant "book" (that comes in a game box, larger than a Monopoly box), with various sizes and colors and shapes of books and magazines and flyers and a children's book and a game board. Why a game box, with a game board? To resuscitate, in part, the idea of reading as game, even if not exclusively for "fun" (though it is also about that). I think the publication of Building Stories is one of the most important events in the history of graphic literature, an instant classic, but it is not all play, and it is not primarily a book for kids. Ware is writing about important and also relatively mundane events in the lives of ordinary people; he's writing about eating and sleeping and work and talk and relationship struggles and parenting, the stuff of any novel, and it's also about adult loneliness.

The protagonist of Building Stories is an (unnamed) woman who lost part of her leg in a childhood boating accident. She lives on the third floor of a three-story Chicago brownstone apartment building, with a couple who constantly argue on the second floor and an older landlady on the first. The woman sees herself as a failed artist, and part of the work follows her in her twenties. Later in life, as a mother, she puts on weight and feels her creativity stifled by what is now a suburban life in Oak Park. She thinks a lot about her first boyfriend, who left her after an abortion, and feels a little frustrated with her husband. So this is a book about women (two others, as well) primarily, who live largely alone and mostly unhappy, and much of that unhappiness seems to be because of men, but it is also about capturing their interior life, each of them.

When this book came out I went to a talk Ware gave at Frank Lloyd Wright's Unity Temple, here in our village of Oak Park, IL, the nearest west suburb of Chicago (and yes, Ware lives 3-4 blocks from me in Oak Park, I'm a neighbor-name-dropper, sorry, okay, I'm human), and he said part of the impetus for the book came from something his wonderful storyteller Grandma suggested he do: To tell the stories of everyday people just doing what they do every day, washing dishes, folding clothes, nothing spectacular. And that is (in part) just what he does, no Hollywood, no flash in the narratives, and yet elevating these lives to importance in these, carefully and lovingly rendered--and in its own way spectacular, exquisite--ways. That's where the "flash" is here, in the amazing art (he's one of the 4-5 best and most influential comics artists ever, without question), clearly. And in revealing the complexities of relationships that emerge over time, primarily ones between men and women.

Ware is famously meticulous; he spends typically 100 hours on each page from start to finish, and this book represents ten years of work, so don't expect a sequel any time soon. As with Jimmy Corrigan, this is a story of interlocking sad stories, building on each other, but they are not ALL sad. Another impetus for this work is the birth of Ware's child, he says, which he sees as this amazing gift to his own own previously lonely life. Ware, famously good at preserving a sense of sadness in so much of his work, includes small moments here that redeem, rescue us, as often happens in parenting. We live in a time when many people seem to be interested in the lives of the sexy and rich and famous, a time when many of us seem to have agreed to the bashing and blaming of the poor for their own poverty, where writing a song like "Eleanor Rigby" suddenly seems out of place, where America's "This is For All the Lonely People" may seem sort of quaint. But these stories of the lonely are important, we need them. The everyday lives of individuals can get lost in today's cynical media culture and in political decision-making. Empathy can get lost in isolation.

So, Building Stories: A fairly simple and mundane title, and concept, that the people who live in a building live lives that can be framed as stories, and these stories "build" on each other and through each other, in some ways, as people interact with each other. And then, maybe especially in an old building we can imagine it happening this way, the building itself becomes a character, sort of omnisciently commenting on the lives lived within its walls. That concept of a building's stories isn't spectacular, maybe (if the walls could talk, we say), but it is powerful in its simplicity and honors his Grandma's wish for the simple and straightforward, though the reading of the texts is anything but simple if you like chronology, and the shared experience of a book group all reading the same thing at the same time. You can't do that with this book, folks. Can't. Obviously. Every piece you take out of the box will determine a different order of the narrative.

How fun to talk about this book in a book group or class, in how differently people read the book. Because each person who picks this "book" up will read it in a radically different way, beginning to end. And while Ware seems sort of aesthetically "controlling" in the meticulousness and precision of his art (feels like Mondrian's mathematical rectangles as much as adult-level Charles Schulz), he does NOT want to control the way you read the story he has written; he makes it impossible for him to control the way you see the story, it is your choice in how you proceed.

And some of the mundane, everyday objects he honors are the things he and so many of us readers love, the differently shaped books of childhood, comic books, pamphlets, journals, magazines, some hard cover, perfect-bound and stitched, some paper, maps, board games. This production could have been done digitally, I suppose, as in just dropping the pieces at a site and letting you play, and probably this will happen, but the old-fashioned part of Ware (as with Seth's work) loves/mourns the passing of the visceral feel and smell of books in paper, in all shapes and sizes. In that Monopoly game box that holds so much for us. In all of Ware there is a deep nostalgia for the passing of time and the loss of things in that passing.

So you read this in the way you want to, randomly picking up pieces and poring over the meticulous artwork and taking one of three primary routes, as they focus on each of three women from three different floors of an old, cool Chicago building (though one moves out to Oak Park, as Ware himself did, from Chicago, so you get spectacular renditions of all the cool architecture here, the Frank Lloyd Wright home and the Unity Temple and some of his other designed homes in this village, one of the most architecturally significant sites in this country). I went to an exhibition of Ware's work on the architecture of Chicago at the Chicago Art Institute a couple years ago, and he is loved and studied by architects everywhere for his precise attention to building details.

What precedent is there for a book as a box of pieces of work? Sorrentino (who wrote a novel he said could be read any way you wanted), Pessoa (who put slips of paper over the years in a box and said it was a novel), digital storytelling with link after link of ways to read; so he isn't inventing this approach, all these ways of writing that lead to open ways of reading exist, but Ware is doing it as well as one can imagine in a product you can hold in your hands, hour after hour. Having a book like this fits with contemporary theories of multiplicity and ways of reading that approach it as subjective, personal, interpretation as open, always.

Building Stories can be read as sadder than I am making it out to be, but in MY reading, which would not be yours, I read a heartwarming part of it at the very last of my reading that seemed to be an even greater impulse for the book, he--an awkward, reclusive, shy guy, with a sweet, sad, Charlie Brown face--getting married and having a kid, the greatest event in his life. . . so as I read it, I thought: THIS is the center of the book, the simplest joys of parenthood, the mundane details of those routines. . . including reading, a daily routine for him and me and many parents.

So, brilliant. Spectacular, I'll say it again, in its quiet way. Ware's Jimmy Corrigan was sad, devastatingly so, focused as it is on two sad generations of miserably abusive people, and also brilliant, but my GN students didn't love it, there wasn't enough place for love and happiness, and it didn't have to, it was speaking for the devastatingly lonely with no happy exits, but in this book while you do have some every day misery you also have simple joys and just sheer beauty, and the simple *achieve* of the thing. This is what I always think about Beckett, that he may despair the twentieth century of the Holocaust, of Hiroshima, but he also admires the simple lonely person: "I can't go on, I'll go on." Ware is not Beckett; or he's Beckett with a Charlie Brown face and heart.

10/15: Finished it again, reading it very, very slowly and it is still and even more so a brilliant, anguishing work of art with little places of recognition that there can be joy in "ordinary" life for all his characters. Breathtaking demonstration of what is possible in storytelling in the graphic medium. Just jaw dropping. And not so much fun as a story. But he honors women (a woman in my class said, "I have never seen such realistically drawn women's bodies," not eroticized, but just as they are, engaging in every day activities). Decidedly ordinary women's stories, honoring his grandmother, his wife and child (I am just guessing here), through fictional portraits and snapshots and anecdotes. Motherhood is praised, honored, sympathized with. Some happy parenting moments. Men play a secondary role and often are not here or suck, and sometimes they are good and supportive and wonderful, but we see them through women's eyes, and (I think) this perspective works for Ware.

Definitely check it out! I bet your library has a copy, but as soon as you see it you will have to have it.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

The title Ware chose for this wonderful assemblage of art work and words makes me think about the many ways in which authors tell their tales. It also prompts thoughts on how we size people up. Ware’s creation gives us plenty to say about story-building and profiling. Context, the narrative arc, appeals to our emotions, structuring, and connections among characters and to our empathetic selves all enter into it.

You’ve no doubt seen the box that houses the contents. In it are 14 individual booklets of different shapes, sizes and formats. There is a bound book, a broadsheet newspaper, pamphlets, and even a cardboard foldout that makes you think of Boardwalk, Park Place and that other cherished asset among certain real estate professionals: the Get Out of Jail Free card.



You’re told order doesn’t matter. There are 14 choices of what to feast your eyes on first. Once you’ve committed to that, there are 13 choices for what to read next. Next there are 12 options, and so on. Those who are not used to factorials in math might be surprised to learn there are 87,178,291,200 different orders that could play out. The reason I mention this is to underscore the myriad of choices story constructors (authors, graphic artists, and those of us learning about people) have for how the story is told. Flashbacks, flashforwards, nonlinearities of all stripes… our perceptions can differ depending on the sequence we choose. Ware must want to emphasize the breadth of what’s possible. Does this enrich the experience? I’m not sure it does. We’re already used to wide combinatorial expanses and random probes into content from the internet. If anything, it’s a convenience when someone who knows what’s there to be conveyed lays out a preferred path. My own view is that starting in the middle at the time when the main characters live in the Chicago brownstone, then filling in with back-stories before picking back up with the chronology would be better. Plus, even though there is little in the way of action or extravagant drama, there was a kind of denouement that I would have been disappointed to learn about too early. It occurred in the 9” x 12” soft-cover booklet with the heading “Disconnect” if you want to save that for the end.

It’s also interesting to think about the graphic novel as a story delivery vehicle. Ware did a brilliant job illustrating the advantages of his media. Like movies or plays, the visuals of a scene are there to behold; no words are needed. Also, a great artist like Ware can convey subtle emotions with his pen. It’s a slightly different, but still effective affirmation of the “show, don’t tell” rule. What I thought Ware did especially well, though, was to lay bare the characters’ interior lives. The many thought bubbles were insightful, they appeared naturally within the narrative, and they highlighted his talent as a writer. It’s no wonder Charles Yu, one of the judges in this year’s Tournament of Books at The Morning News website had this to say:

I mean, this is the Tournament of Books, right? Not the Tournament of Fifteen Books and One Self-Contained Multimedia Sequential Art Narrative Architecture and Environmental Space. It’s like inviting the best 16 basketball players on Earth to have a one-on-one tournament and then telling one of them that, in addition to a basketball, he can also use a baseball bat. OK, that analogy maybe isn’t perfect, but you get my point.

I’ll always prefer books for the full power of their words, but can also see the appeal of grown-up graphic novels. There’s the potential for extra creativity that Ware uses well. Even his panels are done with interesting twists, where the sequencing may be circuitous. Readers may also enjoy subtle clues about time passing, memories replaying, and impressions pixelating into oblivion.

Another aspect of the art form and its potential for telling stories is hinted at on one of Ware’s more interesting pages. In this case the brownstone itself is narrating (which briefly made me wonder if the word building in Building Stories was meant to have a double meaning). Anyway, this page speaks to our curiosity about people and their stories even when these stories are mere snippets or peeks through a window:

Who hasn’t tried, when passing by a building or a home at night, to peer past half-closed shades and blinds hoping to catch a glimpse into the private lives of its inhabitants? Anything… the briefest blossom of movement… maybe a head, bobbing up… a bit of hair… a mysterious shadow… or a flash of flesh… seems somehow more revealing than any generous greeting or calculated cordiality (say, if the tenants were to suddenly be born unto the porch and welcome the voyeur, hands increasingly outstretched) … the disappointing diffusion of a sheer curtain can suggest the most colorful bouquet of unspeakable secrets.

With all this introductory blather I’ve said very little about the characters. This is a gross injustice because this collection is very much character-driven. First and foremost is the young lady on the top floor of the brownstone. She’s often rather sweet but is starved for companionship. Her cat does not suffice, it seems. Oh, and she’s missing part of a leg after a boating accident when she was young. On the floor below is a young married couple with problems. The main source of their trouble as I see it is the guy. He’s a lout. (In fact, the men in this rate poorly, in general. I wonder if Lifetime still makes movies and if so, if they’d be interested in the film rights.) On the bottom floor is the elderly landlady who has always lived there. She was an artist at one time and might have had an interesting trajectory herself, but Ware did not pursue it. The caterwauling couple had a back-story, too, but it wasn’t developed much. Maybe with a sequel, something like More Bricks for Building Stories, we can extrapolate.

The lonely young lady at the top, in contrast, was fleshed out completely (unless you want to be literal about it, with the ever-present reminder of her missing lower leg there for us to notice). Anyway, the unnamed protagonist was mostly but not entirely a sympathetic character. I found myself wanting to bolster her self-esteem given her body image issues tied to her prosthesis and to the weight she was gaining. Sadly, she gave me a feeling of schadenschade. (Freudenfreude would have been nicer, but that wasn’t in the cards.) The happiness that certain events in her life gave her didn’t seem to alter her outlook for long. (I almost used the word Weltanshauung for outlook, but decided I’ve hit the compound German constructs hard enough already. (Now if I could just kick my habit for parenthetical asides.)) From what I’ve heard, Ware’s first major success, Jimmy Corrigan, was more dire than this one. It was uplifting to see that the protagonist here had an impetus for optimism that paralleled Ware’s own – the birth of a daughter. Interviews point to quite a few similarities between Ware and this character. She, too, went to art school and has a way with words. From accounts I’ve heard, self-awareness and a sharp inward focus are other traits they share.

A judge in the later rounds of the Tournament of Books called this collection twee. The commentators, who are typically mild-mannered and supportive of all points of view had trouble letting this comment stand. I can see why. This is a mature work with as much ambition and emotional heft as any standard-format fictional work. It may hurt your soul a little, but it’s well worth the glimpse through the windows into these lives. The stories you build will be sturdy constructions.

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful box. Beautiful books and newspapers and foldout strips. An epic of the everyday. The graphic novel response to Ulysses, with all the humour and ebullience removed. Like B.S. Johnson’s book-in-a-box The Unfortunates, each of the separate components can be read in either order, and like that fine novel, each deal in part with loss and devastation and loneliness (and devastating loneliness). The protagonist of this novel is a miserable neurotic woman with an artificial shank whose entire life is an endless succession of shattered dreams and crushing disappointments and suicidal emptiness, with rare fleeting moments of delusional contentment torn apart by crippling self-doubt and self-loathing in a godless universe filled with nothing but cavernous darkness and sickening inevitability. Just like in real life! But with way more sex! There are moments of heavy-hearted acceptance and way-it-is recognition that will upset and disturb most readers (me included), some of which are powerful and moving on a transcendent-power-of-art level, some of which are merely Radiohead B-sides. The relentless melancholy begins to diminish the impact of many of these moments, and the book fails on a deep human-heart level because it refuses to acknowledge the humour and resilience built into all people, despite the whimsical Best Bee sections. This character, clearly, is a chronic depressive—why doesn’t she see a doctor? But despite the downer, all in all—hats and trousers off to CW for such a bodacious undertaking. Now pass the Prozac-and-opium Pringles.

[Jennifer nyc · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

A fabulous box of comic strips in various shapes and sizes that are all connected, and can be read in any order. The word Building in the title is both a verb for the individual way the reader goes about ordering the pieces, and a noun, to represent the people living within an edifice. It follows them through the years, with an anchoring female protagonist.

I remember a night alone in my dad’s Manhattan apartment looking at the dozens of windows across from me and thinking that each one contained a multitude of stories. This gave me the same sense of possibility.

[Teresa · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars

This work contains, in a beautiful carton, fourteen discrete pieces: one that looks like a Little Golden Book; another as large and colorful as the Sunday comics; and another with print so small I had to take off my glasses to read it, same for the few small illustrations along the inner side of the bottom part of the box. I read somewhere that the creator of this work says it can be read in any order and I'm sure that's true, as the work is anything but linear. I read it in the order that seems to be suggested on the bottom of the carton and that path would seem to me to have the fullest effect.

The author/illustrator's name is found only on the inside of the box and the main character remains unnamed. Though the execution and presentation of this work is unique, the story is less so, though it was a little eerie for me to find a personal parallel with the uncertainties in a storyline concerning a death.

I became a little frustrated with all the alliteration in the second 'book' about Branford the Best Bee in the World, but it was well-written and comes to mean even more than what you think it does. Immediately afterward, though, I read what's probably my favorite of the pieces, the main story of the landlady, who is portrayed as a paper doll. Her story is told backwards in time, a perfect illustration of how little her life has changed.

I read this in one day, which is probably not optimal, but I was immersed. The writing about looking into lit windows of dusky houses was evocative, and I loved the ending of houses being wrong in their predictions and bees not seeing the whole picture -- but then that's true of humans too.

[Seth T. · Rating 5 out of 5]

[Note: this review looks much better on the site from which it comes. And has more pictures.]


[There are an unexpected number of grocery shots in this book.]

Back in March 2011, during that year's Tournament of Books, I was introduced to what might be best described as a concept book. Nox is Anne Carson's literary project to unearth the identity of her recently-departed, long-estranged brother. Instead of pages of text bound between a front and back cover, Nox is a box containing a robust accordion-fold collection of notes, snapshots, receipts, journal entries, and other ephemera of a mystery life. Tournament of Books match commentator John Warner says this about Carson's project:

I read Nox in a single sitting of under an hour, though "read" is the wrong word. "Looked through," or "experienced" might be better. I’m one of the now many who reads in both physical copy and digital formats, and for most of the time, and most books, I can’t really say that the digital version alters the experience in any significant way. Regardless of how you’re reading something, often, text is text is text.

Nox makes a strong argument for its necessity as a physical book. It comes shrink-wrapped, and upon opening, reveals itself to be a box which contains a rendering of a notebook, the pages connected via an accordion fold. The literally continuous nature of the book makes for an unusual sensation as you read, since the pages unfurl from one side and stack on the other. It was almost impossible to stop reading, as the next page was already partially unfolded, reminding you of its looming presence. This is unlike a digital text where you can only assume there’s more behind the next click.

I was dead fascinated by the idea—especially by the idea of a book that justifies its physical nature, it's unwieldy spatial presence. I largely read my comics in bound-paper form. It's not that I don't find digital reproductions as worthwhile or powerful. More, I tend to avoid digital because the preponderance of unreasonable DRM schemes. Still, I wondered if there would be any Nox-like experiments to grace the medium of comics literature. Chris Ware's Building Stories is that experiment.

The descriptions I had read of readers opening Nox and their surprise at its contents were the first non-experiential thing to grace my mind when I began unboxing Building Stories. I hadn't known what to expect. I had seen that Ware had a new book coming out, his first substantial work (I gathered) since Jimmy Corrigan's release more than a decade earlier. I believed merely that I'd be reading an amusingly shaped book, like Ware's prior publications (e.g. Jimmy Corrigan and his odd-dimensioned Acme Novelty Library editions). Instead, this large box (roughly 12"x17") arrived at my office two weeks ago. At first I imagined it a tough slipcase for what would then be a Very Large Hardcover—and so I winced at the thought of trying to read such a heavy, unwieldy thing. Instead though: a box containing fourteen individual pieces of media of different sizes and dimensions. Fourteen stories, some hardbound, some in the form of pamphlets, some the size of newspapers (for those who remember newspapers). One was an 11"x16" folding screen, like a boardgame board. Another two were single pieces of quad-folded paper (like travel brochures), about as tall as the width of a business card but maybe seven inches in length. I of course immediately laid out everything in our office lobby to get a better sense of what I'd soon be attacking. Here is our receptionist, posing with the unboxed Building Stories:



The first thing that will strike any unprepared reader when sitting down to actually read the thing is that there is no starting point. For the disparate apportionment of Ware's stories here, there is no indication of either ordo apocalypsis or even a recommendation of where to begin. From a purely metafictional standpoint, this is one of the more interesting aspects to Ware's project. Very few readers will share the same reading experience.



I mean, even though this is the case with your everyday novel, it's more so the case here. There will be those who approach by pattern, reading smallest to largest or vice versa, but the rest of us? It's entirely possible/likely that no one will have experienced the same story as I did when I read it or you will when you read it. The total possible number of different ways to approach Building Stories is 87,178,219,200 (or more that 87 billion, or 12 times the population of the earth).

What's fascinating about this—for me at any rate—is how wildly different one's experience of the book might be depending on the order imbibed. The book could be read as largely depressing, largely affirming, harmonious, cacophonous, or even just bizarre. I happened to begin with two very downbeat stories, ones that led me to believe that Building Stories might be as depressing or more so than Jimmy Corrigan. This set a tone for me and I was disappointed at the thought that Ware had not graduated from the kind of character that made Jimmy Corrigan so painful and worthwhile. While I found Jimmy Corrigan a particularly worthwhile book, I'm always sad to find authors who exhibit no personal growth in their writing—i.e., our window into their personal reflections on life. When a fifty-year-old writes a song about love, you'd hope he'd write something perhaps more nuanced and incisive than he would have as a teenager



Fortunately, in my reading, things begin looking up. Everything is not quite so dour as I first believed. Ware's protagonist (so much as there is one) is more like a full-orbed person and experiences both highs and lows, even if she does show some indications of clinical depression—so far as my unclinical eye can diagnose. As well, her thought-life is... robust. I use the word robust a lot, but it really is very fitting. While she definitely does wallow occasionally in self-pity and a panoply of woe-is-me predictive scenarios, she's also thoughtful about social issues and the ethics of trivial actions. There's even fleeting interest in questions of philosophy and theology. She is a woman built of hopes, recriminations, desires, disgusts, fears, joys, and a waxing and waning of drive. Much like any of us.



With so many diverse pieces of comics literature included in Building Stories' box, a chief question will be How Well Does It Hold Together? Ware's pieces occur in different eras and while generally focusing on the Woman, some of the artifacts concern the Old Woman Downstairs, the Fighting Couple, or Branford Bee (a local apine denizen who intersects with the Woman's narrative for about a day). I held some small anxiety that Building Stories would be among those popular contemporary novels in which each chapter follows a different character but never comes together in any satisfying way (a la Let the Great World Spin). Those books are fine for what they are but I never find them as deeply satisfying as books that draw themselves together a bit more tightly.

My concerns were happily unnecessary. While Building Stories may not function so much as a traditional novel—offering a common Western narrative structure of beginning, middle, end—it does what it does very well. There is no overall build of tension, no climax, no denouement—but there was never any pretension to such things. Beyond the impossibility of discovering The Correct Order in which to read Ware's creation, his intension is less about unveiling a plot as it is about discovering a life lived. This is the life of the Woman, and by the end of it you will know her as well as you know many of your friends. She is undressed, not for your approval so much as for your empathy. This is the closest many of us will come to walking in another's shoes.



Andrew Womack, the Tournament of Books judge who allowed Nox to move forward into the next round of the tourney says this about his experience with Carson's attempt to give shape to the outline of a brother she'd only spoken to five times in twenty-two years:

I reached the end of the scroll and slid the box closed. Even with the book closed, I felt that discomfort again. When the task is to sum up a life, how adept can any of us be? Carson comes to terms with her brother’s death by accepting that she won’t ever know all the answers; sometimes out of chaos comes only more chaos. Nox is a beautiful new look at life and what comes before and after it, and an enrapturing read from beginning to end.

Building Stories functions similarly, though possibly with greater clarity. Ware gives us to spend substantial time with the Woman, but we cannot possibly know her as we know ourselves. For all the many pages of insight, he still presents us an incomplete portrait whose history is scattered to the winds. Ware has picked up many pages from her's life's story, but certainly not all of them. There are gaps, holes. There are stories from her life that I wished Ware would have dwelt on more. Or at all. That, however, does not diminish from the work; it may even, in some way, magnify it.


[I censored this image for nudity for the sake of the mothers of younger readers who really won't appreciate the book anyway.]

At one point I had considered that the project's title, Building Stories, referred to the actual, physical structure in which the Woman spends much of her time in many of the book's discrete portions. (That building, after all, does even narrate one of the stories.) After a while, however, I came to believe that Building was not here used as a noun, but instead a verb. Instead of stories about or in the vicinity of buildings, Ware is focused on building (or constructing) the stories that round out the personhood of a particular individual, the Woman. He does not need his stories to add up to a grander story. He does not need them to fill out an over-arching structure. Such an over-story does not here exist nor was it ever intended to.

This is why Ware doesn't concern himself with alerting the reader to a recommended order for approaching the work. Story, in the large sense, isn't the point. Because he is revealing a person, not a story. And which one of us ever lived a life that was a functioning story? Sure, there might be brief instances that might circumscribe a storylike structure. Or narratives that exist only as cherry-picked collections of moments, working toward an artificially constructed framework that we force upon our lives at a distance. But nobody's life is that neatly set and laid. Not mine, not yours, and not the Woman's. And this is why Building Stories is such a success. Ware deftly gives us both sense of person and sense of history's capriciousness. These are stories, but instead of adding up to a Story, they add up to more. They add up to a person, living and breathing, and tossed to and fro by the winds of circumstance, hope, and fear. Ware called his project Building Stories, but he could have as likely called it The Human Condition, though that might have been too on the nose.



Building Stories is a phenomenal work. I don't believe I was predisposed to think it so. While I enjoyed Jimmy Corrigan (as much as someone can enjoy something so relentlessly depressing), I haven't much followed Ware's work in the last decade. I tried one of his "Rusty Brown" collections but found I loathed the character so much that I never picked up anything Ware had done since. I even approached Building Stories with some degree of guarded caution. Despite this, Chris Ware blew me away with his vision of this Woman and her surrounds. Building Stories is deep and deserves multiple readings—already I'm forgetting things and struggling to remember how certain details fit together. And of course, no two readings need resemble each other in the least. This book gets my highest recommendation, and the next time I update my Top 100 it is certain to unseat Daytripper as my Number Two favourite comic.
_______________

Whining
I wish so very badly that its ticket price were lower. I got it on a good pre-order discount and had some store credit to knock it down a bit more. It's not that I'm averse to spending money on the things I enjoy. It's just that Building Stories is such a rich, important literary experience that I'm desperate to share it with book clubs and friends. The price tag, however, makes that almost impossible. And the scattered nature of the box's contents makes me doubtful that libraries will want to carry the thing. As someone who spends substantial personal investment in evangelizing his social circle with the gospel of good comics, being unable to promote the medium using such a magnificent work is heartrending.
_______________

Footnotes
1) I've purchased and read several comics through Dark Horse's, Viz's, and Top Shelf's digital apps and the experience, while tactilely different and leaving the reader incapable of flipping through pages with any real facility, was not a far change from the more traditional means of comics consumption.

2) Meaning that I, the purchaser, am not the owner of the thing purchased and am merely a leasee. I cannot loan digital comics to friends. I cannot give them to a friend to keep for as long as he wants. I cannot sell when I no longer want to keep the book around. The only two rights I am granted by digital purchasing under current DRM models are 1) the right to read my books so long as the service I'm leasing from allows it, and 2) the right to delete the book from my archive. I'm still excited by the potential of digital publication but I find the means through which companies distribute their digital content abhorrent.

3) That is to say, a recommended order of revelation, an indication as to which piece should be read in which order.

4) For instance, our own individual experiences and circumstances always colour our readings of even common novels, giving us each our own slightly unique filter through which we approach a work.
_______________

[This review comes courtesy of Good Ok Bad]

[Eddie Watkins · Rating 3 out of 5]

While I comport myself in a solid even-keeled way, topped by a serious face, inside I ride waves of turbulent emotions. My inner moods pendulum between absolute cosmic bleakness and star-hopping ecstasy, with an occasional glide through stretches of dull unspecified sadness. The rest is routine involvement in those things I enjoy doing, and so could be called happiness I suppose, though looking at me few would know.

The stretches of dull unspecified sadness are the least interesting to me, though even they give evidence that I am at least feeling something. But still, while in this monotonous glide I constantly struggle to wrest myself from it because I do not find it interesting. The fact that I constantly struggle to wrest myself from it probably means that I am very rarely what I would call depressed, which is a state of collapsed deflated emotions and enervated will leaving no inner resource with which to escape from it. Depression, especially a mild unspecified depression, is not at all interesting. It is in fact defined by a lack of interest.

While reading Chris Ware’s Building Stories I struggled to determine the extent of the emotional spectrum being explored. This is difficult because the emotions explored through the visual elements seems larger than the spectrum explored through the characters themselves, but the characters are what carry the story, so there’s a disjunct between the visual and character elements. The characters, or really the character, as the woman with the prosthesis carries the book and is by far the most explored, spends the greater part of this collection of graphic novelties in a state of more or less shallow depression, while the visuals ebb and flow between rich sadness touched by bleakness and sadness-tinged joy. The main character no doubt experiences small joys throughout, and these are of course expressed through the visuals themselves, but still somehow the larger reaches of emotion expressed in the book go beyond the reaches of this character.

This is my one and only disappointment with this book: that the characters, especially the main character, were not more varied and, frankly, interesting, because the visual interest is essentially endless. But even as I say this I acknowledge that Ware’s focus on the almost numbingly mundane aspects of his characters’ lives was very much the point of this project. So where does this leave me? I still wish the main character was invested with a larger emotional spectrum – full on cosmic existential anguish rather than can’t-get-out-of-bed low-grade depression, and perhaps an irrational ecstasy or two – and a broader range of experience, so that her life grew to fill out the varied visual scope of the book. I also wish that the other tenants of the building were explored more, rather than being relegated to bit parts. But would this contradict Ware’s intentions? Probably. And maybe when I read it again more subtle variations, and maybe even escapes, from his theme will become apparent; but as it stands now I am left with a slight regret that this absolutely gorgeous and immersive box of varied visual objects is topped by a serious face that conceals little more than a mild depression that is not all that interesting.

[Ray Nessly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Why does every “great book” have to always be about criminals or perverts? Can’t I just find one that’s about REGULAR people living everyday LIFE?

Thus laments, ironically, the protagonist of Building Stories, which is itself her story, from childhood to middle age. Gloriously ordinary. It’s told via an unusual and extremely creative format, a graphic novel “boxed set” of differently sized and shaped books, magazines, pamphlets, a newspaper and a board game-like foldout:


They are not meant to be read in any particular order. I suppose the author wants each of us to have a different experience reading the materials. It seems appropriate, as well, given that none of us recalls our own lives in a linear fashion.

As Seth (link to his review below) puts it: “Beyond the impossibility of discovering The Correct Order in which to read Ware’s creation, his [intention] is less about unveiling a plot as it is about discovering a life lived. This is the life of the Woman, and by the end of it you will know her as well as you know many of your friends.”

Occasionally we get the POV of other characters—the landlady, neighbors, even the apartment building itself (its ‘thoughts’ in cursive). But these are on only a few pages. The vast majority of this collection features a nameless woman. The mood is often melancholic, as she’s insecure about her looks and partially amputated leg (childhood accident).
MEN just don’t understand the tremendous anxiety girls feel about their bodies and appearances, I don’t think. It’s not part of their culture.

She’s insecure also about her talents as a writer and painter. In many of the pieces, she reflects on her loneliness. At one point she reveals her deep hurt when her “one and only” boyfriend left her, a long “eight or nine” years previously:
BROKEN simply isn’t a strong enough word for what someone can do to your heart. It’s more like ‘annihilated’ or ‘punched out’. But no word captures the undeniable, obliterated emptiness that having a broken heart feel like. It’s as if I had a hole in me that I desperately wanted to fill, to turn myself inside out like a dirty shirt thrown on the floor, to pull myself backwards through the sleeve … anything … just to fill the void.

The woman deals with conflicts we all can relate to: challenging relationships, noisy neighbors, loved ones with cancer. Eventually, she finds love and marries Phil, an architect. They move into a nice house in Oak Park, and they have a daughter, Lucy. The woman has cats. Mr. Kitty, who gets sick and dies, and later, Miss Kitty. I like the tiny word balloons that give “voice” to Miss Kitty’s gurgling stomach and near silent meows.

I like the variety in material. One is a newspaper, the Daily Bee—literally a newspaper for bees, its byline: God Save the Queen. (Elsewhere in the story, a bee struggles against a windowpane. Your reaction to either depends on which you saw first, the newspaper or the panel with the bee.) Panels vary greatly in size. The larger foldouts allow for bigger panels. Elsewhere, it gets a bit annoying, frankly, trying to read the tiny print when the panels shrink to 1 inch, half inch, and even 3/8 inch. (Yes, I got a ruler out). I didn’t reach for a magnifying glass like other reviewers did. The artwork is gorgeous. Ware writes very well, even eloquently, but I did long sometimes for more silent panels, to let the illustrations tell more of the story. Especially when they got so small. But that’s the only quibble I had. I read the collection gradually, one or two pieces a day over more than a week.

“Ware is famously meticulous; he spends typically 100 hours on each page from start to finish, and this book represents ten years of work”—Dave Schaafsma
For a deeper dive into Building Stories, I highly recommend Dave’s review and also Seth’s. Links below.




Dave’s review https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Seth’s review https://www.goodreads.com/review/show....

[Christopher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Check out that photo above that I stole from Amazon. Isn't it pretty? It's a whole bunch of reading devices that fit into a colorful box. There's a hardbound book, there's a Little Golden Books-style book, a couple newspaper-sized comics, and several doodads and even two or three various whatchamajigs. It weighs in at six pounds.



This is the incredibly creative Building Stories by Chris Ware. In it, the reader discovers the lives of (mainly) four characters who share the same building. They're all very normal. They feel lonely a lot of the time, even if they are with friends, spouses, or family members. They have trouble communicating their true feelings. They spend much of their time laying on the couch in their underwear and investigating the lives of their exes on Facebook. They go jogging after inspecting their emerging paunches in the mirror. One of them is missing a leg.

This is everything that comics should be; it's the antithesis of the Sunday funnies and superhero comics. Chris (yeah, we're best friends, we're on a first name basis) weaves labyrinths out of paper. Instead of reading left to right through panels, Ware moves your eye around the page in a pattern that's easy to follow but completely unlike any reading experience you're familiar with.



I want to say, but I hesitate to say it, that this is a comic book for non-comics readers. Thankfully, there are no capes in this book. If it were somehow translated into prose it would fit snugly in the literary fiction department. But it's still pretty nerdy. I spent a lot of time geeking out at the beautiful art and saying to my wife "check out these lineweights and the way he moved from this thought bubble to this panel and isn't that awesome how the building is thinking out loud" (to which my wife responded by continuing to watch Say Yes to the Dress).

But this is undoubtedly near the pinnacle of graphic books. It's up there with Craig Thompson's Habibi and Art Spiegelman's Maus. I'm pretty sure nothing drawn and written has reached the summit of what books with pictures can do yet, but this is getting dangerously close.

[First Second Books]

I finally got my hands on BUILDING STORIES and was disappointed to discover that all of the reviews that called it a "ground-breaking new format where the reader connects the pieces to assemble an apartment building full of interlocking stories" weren't literal. Guys, I really thought this book was a kit to build an actual model building! I'm so bummed!

[Liam O'Leary · Rating 5 out of 5]

2020 Update: enough time has passed for me to correct my rating, because for now Ware's big works are really the 5* standard for indie comics, despite the criticisms mentioned below.

I think this has to be Chris Ware's magnum opus. Yes, Lint is a better story. Yes, Rusty Brown might be a better collection. But Building Stories as a work has redefined the novel entirely.

It comes in a box and can be read in any order!! Can we take another minute to appreciate the importance of this? The book has become a play set. This is the transformation of a medium from information, into toy. That sounds superficially derogatory but it's actually the highest compliment I can pay. If you think about how fundamentally 'un-fun' a book inherently is, you'll see that what Chris Ware's done here is close to magic. And it's my duty as a reader in the early 21st century to convince the public to embrace indie comics as a cultural shift in what reading is.

----

Note: I had already read Acme Novelty Library #18 before reading this.

Honestly, I'm disappointed. This very easily gets 5*+ of content value, but falls short when seen as a single arrangement, or work/oeuvre (whatever), which I will militantly review it as such.

*Mild Spoiler Alert*

This seemed more like 'extending stories' to me. Everything here was consistently very good, but not as good, as the original Acme Novelty Library. This was like an amazing film with a bad epilogue, it faded sadly as a drone.

I sort of liked the way Acme Novelty Library #18 ended. The protagonist alone without any current glimmers of hope. Maybe I'm cruel, but it felt more real and alive in some ways. The more reassuring ending given here (the real end being that of 'Disconnected', I guess) was less satisfying. I felt myself losing distance.

We learn about a daughter and some adult-life 'events', but from afar. I find it strange that there was no development when the protagonist hires a nanny at one point, there could have been some de ja vu moments or reflection...

I sort of think the Brandon the Bee addition deserves a -1* in terms of the arrangement. I don't know what everyone else thinks, but this comes off at odds with the rest of the work, and feels very unfinished in itself. Why spend so many panels thinking about Queen bee if she doesn't factor into the story? Why does his wife ever take off her glasses? I don't mind plotless stories, but ones which set up plots and then avoid all of them are nothing but frustratingly unsatisfying.

[Tom LA · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a masterwork. Not only "Building stories" belongs to the pantheon of the very best graphic novels ever created, it is also a unique artistic concept as it comes in a box and it consists of 14 pieces: booklets, newspapers, strips, cardboards and magazines. They are all interconnected, but the reader can choose the order in which to read them. As soon as I discovered this, I asked myself "how could I miss its - no less than heroic - publication in 2012?", and I ran to get it.

Rather than a book, this is an "art installation". Something that deserves to be in a museum of modern art.

The author, Chris Ware, followed his Grandma's advice of creating a story out of regular people going about their everyday things and actions. The idea in itself is not very good, because in reality it is Ware's exceptional execution that elevates this "book" to the masterpiece level. His love for a high volume of tiny details resonates with me so much, the confidence he has with the comic medium, the incredible expressiveness of the characters, the poetry of some perceptions and moments.

This is great literature in the form of comics, and something more. Another diamond, another proof that comics have the power to touch majestic heights.

Sadly, thanks to the low level of education of the average comic-reader, they remain too often at the abysmal level of superheros and monsters shooting each other and flexing biceps.

[Gary Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Where do we start? What do we do next? How do we make sense out of all this? With Chris Ware’s Building Stories, as with life, the answer seems to be, “Just keep going. It will all come together, probably.”

Building Stories is a challenging, rewarding reading experience. I can’t say book; I can’t say graphic novel; I can’t say comic. None of those words quite fit Building Stories. Chris Ware’s newest work is the story of a woman’s life, and it comes in what looks like a game box, similar to Monopoly or … Life. And the metaphors begin.

Inside the box are fourteen different pieces of her story. Readers can start with any of the pieces and read them in any order. Does the story change depending on where a reader starts and the order in which the pieces are read? Who knows? We can only go through things once for the first time. We only get one shot at freshly building this story.

Building? Story? Chris Ware also leads us to closely examine those words. Building means constructing, and it also means an architectural structure. Stories are narratives, and they are also levels within those architectural structures. As we play with those definitions in different combinations, we come to see what Chris Ware is saying about how we make meaning out of our lives and those of others.

As we go through Building Stories, we feel a little differently as we handle each piece. The main character’s story emerges partially through colorful newspapers, partially through a game board, partially through a Golden Book-like installment, and partially through other odd-sized pages, papers and conglomerations. Understanding her life from navigating a game board seems symbolically appropriate, as does learning about her from a newspaper. Stories come to us in many ways. (None of this would work on an e-reader. Building Stories is paper-based and cannot be any other way. Take that, Kindle and Nook.)

The woman’s story, regardless of how an individual reader reveals it, is devastatingly sad, but it’s in told in comic art. So Chris Ware has also given us his tragicomic metaphor for life. Even when things go badly, it’s still just sort of funny. Life is both at the same time.

Oh, and there are bees. And a cat. Their lives, as it turns out, are not much different from those lived by people. Kind of sad at times. Kind of funny at other times. Their stories, and ours, depend on how we build and understand them. Some of it we control; some of it we don’t. Some of it we’re given; some of it we build.

Cross-posted on What's Not Wrong?

[Ben Winch · Rating 4 out of 5]

A recent, happy holiday in Germany alone with my wife afforded me both a cheap copy of Building Stories (discovered, by some fluke, in a spa-town fleamarket) and the chance to read it, in collusion with my wife, over three quiet evenings with the various pieces of Chris Ware’s puzzle spread across the loungeroom floor. It was quite an experience. Some readers (my wife included) have suggested that Ware’s opus is depressing – Goodreader Eddie Watkins referred to Ware’s “Asperger’s of sadness” and MJ Nicholls likened it to Ulysses without the humour – but maybe owing to the extreme, sun-kissed and peace-suffused beauty of this rare week alone with my lover, during which, evening after evening, we returned to our accommodation tired and sated and wanting for nothing except a good sleep, I sank into Ware’s bright colourful world with relish, as into a vast hand-stitched eiderdown, and felt as immune to his characters’ sufferings as I was enchanted by the sure hand depicting them. For me, there’s a magic here I haven’t seen since Miffy – Ware’s and Dick Bruna’s worlds are similarly stylised, sleek and glowing – and hence there’s a dual nature, a counterpoint, to these stories, bleak (not to say dull) as they may seem in synopsis. For me, Ware’s way of seeing lifts them, all these various-shaped fragments, into another realm entirely from the realm his characters consciously see. A tree, a streetscape, some fruit piled in a supermarket, the many stunning depictions of flowers, the Chicago buildings he draws so lovingly – all these depictions have a lucid hyper-reality that is ever so slightly psychedelic. A cat curls, yawns and stretches on a bed, its expression, in all its features, touchingly lifelike. Pages pass without text; Ware is a virtuoso of the wordless. And I like his characters, thinly-drawn as (aside from the protagonist) they may be. Could he be more hopeful? Sure, just as his characters (as Eddie Watkins says) could be more passionate, and their stories more well-rounded. I don’t think Ware’s a genius storyteller – or let’s say I don’t think he’s found the right vessel for that genius if he is – but he’s far from a lame one, and given his choice of protagonist (a lonely mother and failed artist with, slightly bizarrely, a prosthetic leg), and his treatment of her, I find him sympathetic. He’s got heart. Ulysses it ain’t, but it’s some kind of masterpiece, and a beautiful set of art objects which I’ll be returning to in future.

[Sasha · Rating 5 out of 5]

A collection of interwoven graphic stories meant to be shuffled and read in random order, Ware's Building Stories has gotten a lot of attention in 2013 as comic writing continues to sidle awkwardly past puberty like a wimpy kid hoping to get past a group of dicks with their hats backwards before they notice him and take his lunch money. Metaphors, bitch!

It's reasonably effective. The lead story here, about a young woman who's convinced her life is awful and then later is convinced it's awful in a different way, is nicely done. Made me want to go kiss my girlfriend, which to be fair so does reading other books and so does not reading books, but still.

Chris Ware - you know what makes me feel hesitant is saying "Ware writes women well," because what do I know? You tell me, lady. But I feel like Ware writes women well. I bet chicks would dig this book!, says a dude enthusiastically.

He's a tremendous observer; the book's full of tiny observations like a dead bird you see out of the corner of your eye that just bums you right out all of a sudden. And he uses art well to convey that stuff. His layouts are clever.

I guess my one hesitation - no wait, I have two hesitations. The first is that it's teetering on maudlin a few times. Lonely old ladies, y'know? Dead cats.

The second is that I understood, from what I've heard* and also from the title, which is plural, that this would be interwoven stories. And there's really only one story, and then some vignettes. I was actually really interested in that asshole who married that other asshole and then they didn't like each other. I kinda thought there'd be some more of them. And on the other hand the story about the bee was cute, but if you're gonna go that far for that morbid punchline, I think there should be more of everything else too.

* among other places, I heard that in the first sentence of this very review, where I specifically wrote "interwoven" - see? It's right there!

I liked this. I might even bump it to five stars, because the storytelling is really very inventive indeed; Ware's achieved what he set out to here. It's fun to read, it's engaging. There's real feeling and insight here. I wish there was more, and that can't be a bad thing.**

** yes it can

Update: Chris convinced me (under his review) that this actually is the right amount of story, so I'm bumping this to five stars. It's a really good book. Thanks Chris!

[sean · Rating 2 out of 5]

Maybe it's deliberately provocative to give a low rating to such a technically accomplished feat of storytelling, I don't know, but no amount of visual novelty can disguise the hollowness and cynicism of Chris Ware's worldview. So we're all white and we're all sad and we all have some job and we're all repulsed by the ageing bodies of our spouses. So we're all afflicted with some amorphous melancholy and we all have to confront the dying faces of our fathers and we all have humiliating memories from high school that rear their heads when we're on dates at a local bar. Yawn. If these stories weren't presented in twee/well InDesign'd novelty objects they would never be published.

Usually, if I'm developing an uncharitable reading of a book, I will try to catch myself out. I don't like saying cruel things about writers. But Building Stories is a book designed for an otherwise well-adjusted middle class that wants to safely glimpse at its underlying misery without having to ask questions about it. Ware apparently believes that primary condition of modern bourgeois life is pain, but by packaging that pain in a tasteful and expensive gift box he allows the reader to feel noble for experiencing it, for aestheticising the comfortable disappointment that characterises the undercurrent of their everyday lives, before packing it neatly back onto the shelf for their dinner guests to tactfully point out. Like The National or Drake, Ware is convinced that ambient, low-level, possibly medicated sadness always signifies meaning. But once I got past the initial glitz of this book's presentation I found it totally awful and insufferable.

[John Seven · Rating 2 out of 5]

The problem with Building Stories is that while Ware is still a skilled and intelligent cartoonist, in context of his own work it doesn't really represent any kind of move forward. It's really more of the same, with razzle dazzle in the form of packaging. The characters are moribund and whiny, endlessly going on their gloomy, bitter monologues to the point where the whole venture becomes tiresome. Part of this is due to the fact that Ware relies less on his visuals and presentation to tell a story and more on words in the form of long diatribes and, in that way, it's not very skillfully written. There's even sloppiness in the graphic work - Ware insists on sticking panels in the middle of the page in some books as a way of anchoring the design. Problem is, these panels are right in the fold of the book, which not only pretty much undercuts any sort of symmetry he was seeking, but actually obscures the action in some of them. Ware has done so much better work in his past and this, it seems to me, ended up on a lot of Top 10 lists mostly based on his reputation than the reality of what he delivered. Once you get past the packaging and let it all sink in, you see it's a very empty building.

[Savior Sullivan · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Building Stories" by Chris Ware is an innovative graphic novel that transcends traditional storytelling. Presented in a boxed set of assorted books, booklets, magazines, and pamphlets, it allows readers to choose their own path through the interlocking lives of its characters. Set in a Chicago apartment building, Ware weaves together the stories of the building's residents, including a young woman grappling with personal and artistic struggles.

Pros 👍

- Innovative Format: Its unique physical format and non-linear storytelling offer a groundbreaking reading experience.
- Rich, Emotional Storytelling: The narratives are poignant, exploring themes of loneliness, longing, and the human condition.
- Stunning Artwork: Ware's detailed and expressive illustrations add depth to the story.

Cons 👎

- Potentially Overwhelming: The unconventional format can be daunting, with no prescribed way to approach the story.
- Requires Active Engagement: It demands more from the reader in terms of engagement and piecing together the narrative.
- Somber Tone: The stories often have a melancholic feel that may not appeal to all readers.

Rating: ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

4 out of 5 stars. "Building Stories" is a masterpiece of graphic literature, offering a unique and immersive experience, though its format and tone may not suit everyone's taste.

Reading Suggestions:

- "Asterios Polyp" by David Mazzucchelli: A graphic novel that also explores complex characters and themes.
- "Fun Home" by Alison Bechdel: Another graphic memoir with deep emotional and narrative layers.
- "Chantilly" by Savior Sullivan : For a novel that might offer innovative storytelling and rich character development.

In summary, Chris Ware's "Building Stories" is not just a book but a unique experience. It challenges the conventions of graphic novels and storytelling, offering a poignant, introspective look into the lives of its characters. The novel stands as a testament to the power of the graphic novel as a serious and profound medium of storytelling.

[Keith · Rating 3 out of 5]

I remember my high school art teacher telling me a story once about when Bob Dylan met the Beatles for the first time at a party. According to my art teacher, Dylan saw the Four from across a room and sneered, "You guys have so much power, and you could do anything....and you choose to make this."

And in no way, obviously, could anything Chris Ware does be worthy of such vitriol. It's too smart, too intricate, too multi-faceted -- a monument to what craft, focus, and workmanship can create. And with Building Stories, this comes to a head: it's a box of comics, books, newspapers and even a sort of board game all designed to refract around the lives of an intersecting group of characters, the lives they lead and the thoughts that plague them.

But in this, as with pretty much his entire body of work, the message is oppressive and unavoidable: no matter who you are, you are irrevocably flawed, which would be fine except that your flaws hurt the people you love. You have lived a life worth regretting. The ghost of sadness that clings to you when a loved one looks away is connected, deeply, to your inability to make your life what you want it; the disfigured woman on the third floor of your building really does have little to make her happy, and will settle on a marriage of dissatisfaction because it's better than dying alone. You do not look good naked, and did not appreciate your body when you were younger. Your cat only asked for you to love it,and in return you rendered it incapable of having children. Your own children cannot make friends, and when you put the cat to sleep, the emptiness you were left with is what you deserved.

[Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Total genius. Anyone giving this less than 5* is obviously confused.

[Titus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Building Stories is a comic about life. It's a comic that encapsulates, in a broad and multifaceted way, what it is to be a human.

Of course, a lot of fiction seeks to capture the essence of human experience – if I were more inclined to sweeping statements, I might even say this is a feature of all great art. However, Building Stories distinguishes itself by its total devotion to this goal. It's purely about life, unadulterated by concerns of plotting or drama. Like real life, Building Stories has no 3-part narrative structure, no big twist or grand reveal, no dramatic redemption, no life-changing epiphany, no smooth character arc, no moral, and no happily-ever-after. Moreover, it's not just about one aspect of life, but about life in general. It's about childhood, young adulthood, middle age, and old age. It's about dating, break-ups, marriage, parenthood, and friendships. It's about studying, working, doing laundry, going jogging, buying groceries, getting lost, caring for pets, going out for dinner, and dealing with faulty plumbing. It's about grief, guilt, embarrassment, financial worries, existential angst, boredom, loneliness, and anxiety about whether rising oil prices might lead to societal collapse.

Fair warning: Building Stories is pretty damn depressing. Its characters are seldom happy. Sometimes it's so bleak that it's painful to read. But somehow, taken as a whole, it shows life to be beautiful. There are moments of joy, and moments of humour, and above all there’s an undefinable sense that life is, despite its hardships, ultimately worthwhile.

One of my main problems with Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth (perhaps Chris Ware’s most famous comic, and the only work of his that I’d read before this one) is that I’m completely unable to relate to its protagonist. This is partly because he is, to quote my own review of that comic, “the dullest, meekest, least charismatic person imaginable”, but more importantly it’s because the reader is given so little insight into his thoughts and feelings. In this respect, Building Stories couldn’t be more different: throughout, the reader is given a direct line into the main characters’ minds. Indeed, the work as a whole can be read as a jumble of the protagonist’s own memories – even the parts where she herself is absent could be interpreted as her suppositions and fantasies.

The comic is formatted in a way that undermines simple chronology. Rather than a single book with a beginning and an end, Building Stories is a large box, full of books, booklets and sheets of paper of various shapes and sizes, which can be read in any order. Furthermore, chronology is sometimes deconstructed on a single page: some pages are purposefully ambiguous as to how they should be read, while others having clear signposting that guides the reader in unpredictable directions around a larger image. This rejection of straightforward chronology may sound like it’s at odds with my claim that the work encapsulates human experience – after all, human beings are bound by time, and experience things in the order that they happen – but in fact this is a brilliant way of capturing life not as it happens, but as it’s remembered. When you look back at your life, you don’t replay events in order – you’re not even capable of doing so. Instead, your memories of yesterday mingle with those of bygone years; cause and effect become jumbled, but patterns, connections and associations emerge.

Perhaps most importantly, the comic’s anti-chronological construction is vital in liberating it from the binds of narrative structure. By forcing the reader to start at a seemingly random point in the characters’ lives, Building Stories drives home the fact that lives are not stories, but are in fact just raw material from which stories can be built. Different events and moments are put on an equal footing, showing that significance is something that we (as story builders) afford them, not something intrinsic to them. In this way, Building Stories suggests that any moment, no matter how mundane, has the potential for great beauty, power and sadness.

Thanks to its innovative structure, as well as brilliant writing, Building Stories draws me into its characters’ lives to as great an extent as any comic, novel or film that I’ve experienced. I feel their pain and joy, and I become completely invested in their trials and tribulations – no matter how banal. The protagonist feels like a real, complex, nuanced individual, with utterly relatable fears, doubt and anxieties, even if her own life experiences and circumstances are materially quite different from my own. What’s more, the same can be said of several members of the supporting cast. Although this is by no means an escapist work, it completely absorbs me. Although it’s largely devoid of conventional drama, it has me hanging off every word

Building Stories is a comic about life. It’s a brutal, unflinching, unglamourized depiction of life, where moments of joy are few and far between, but it’s one that I find profoundly moving. I have no hesitation in saying that Chris Ware is a genius, and that Building Stories is a masterpiece – without a doubt, one of the best comics I’ve read.

[Mangrii · Rating 5 out of 5]

M A S T E R P I E C E!

[A · Rating 2 out of 5]

As someone who handles the printing and manufacturing of high production value illustrated books for a living, I have to say I was not at all impressed by this package. (No offense to the legendary Andy Hughes who handled the production on this -- quality is lovely, just not all that impressive.)

So apparently this artful jumble of 14 supposedly varied and unique pieces are meant to be a celebration of the lost art of printed matter, a return to the tactile ur-wonders of comics art, a paean to the many vast and varied ways we process memories. BUT...well....all 14 pieces are printed on the same paper (which Ware says is deliberate), colored in the same palette, drawn in the same style, paced in the same way, every panel sized and plotted out in precisely the same fashion. The only difference between one piece and the next is what size it's been cut down to! That's not a celebration of the physical book as objet, or a manifestation of how varied and rich our memories render the past. That's basically saying here's this half-formed comic that I couldn't cohere into an interesting story, so rather than putting normal chapter breaks in it and slapping it between 2 covers, I just chopped it up into a bunch of arbitrarily different sizes and threw it in a box in hopes that you would be so distracted by all the shuffling and unfolding and page-turning that you wouldn't notice I don't have all that much to say.

Because Ware doesn't have much to say here. The plot is banally melodramatic, the pacing torturously dull, the characters utterly mundane in their thoughts and preoccupations. Yes, Ware's books have always been about the oppressive schlubbiness of existence, but his teeming, OCD-inflected drawing style and unique (literal and figurative) perspective on how humans interact always sea-changed that into something rich and strange. Here, Ware seems to leave the transformative heavy lifting to the "unusual" (ahem, not at all unusual and actually completely uniform) format, and it's a bit of an Emperor's New Clothes situation. Go ahead and tack one of the flashier panels of this up in your cubicle if you're feeling artsy, but to derive true pleasure in Ware's work, stick to the pieces you can find between 2 standard book covers.

[Michael Seidlinger · Rating 5 out of 5]

Inspiration, insanity, and sadness in one big box.

In essence:

Life.

[Jackie · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is "book" is actually a box of a variety of materials which tell a story. My evaluations fall under two categories: its merits as an art project and the quality of the story it tells.

First, as an art project, it's an interesting premise: a box full of different materials each of which adds to the overall story in a different way. There are many different physical print formats represented: a large newspaper, a board game like fold up, a little golden book, some comic book issues, a few long comic strips. However, the artistic content of all of these is the same graphic novel style throughout, regardless of the print medium used. It would have been much more effective to connect the content and physical medium more thoroughly. Like the newspaper should have been an actual newspaper with different articles giving you information about the principle characters as well as the broader setting of the story. The little golden book could have been a children's fairy tale, as an abstract representation of one of the side characters. As it is, the unchanging format made the reading tedious and removed the novelty of the differing physical mediums. As a whole, it is an idea that was not carried to its full potential.

The summary of the book's plot is misleading; it implies that book concerns a small apartment building and its residents. However, the vast majority of the book's contents dwell on one woman, and not even necessarily focusing exclusively on the portion of her life spent in that building. She is not an interesting woman. At first, I thought the author's grand point was going to be that, surprise!, strangers have deep meaningful lives if only you knew them, but after finishing I'm not sure he even had that cliche of a point in mind. I'm not sure there's a point at all. The story left me feeling less empathetic towards the main character (whose name I don't think we ever learn) rather than more connected. She's so self-absorbed, she takes *everything* as a personal attack, and she lashes out at anyone who however indirectly reminds her that she's unsatisfied with her life. It's annoying to read about for so long, and this book is surprisingly long. You will be stuck reading this miserable woman's whiny inner monologue for a long time.

Trust me, and take a hard pass on this one.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've not read many graphic novels where the protagonist didn't wear a cape or their underwear outside of their pants. With that confession out of the way I'd like to say that Chris Ware has done something special with the medium here.
His artwork is not lush; in fact it has a geometrical quality. Most of the panels are tiny, and large objects such as the building just provide another opportunity to showcase a lot of small panels.

The real story here is how Ware is able to use the compact panels to control the mood of the graphic novel. This is a bleak and depressing story that excels in describing the struggles of every day life with amazing authenticity. Ware excels at lettering and is able to fit large amounts of text into the story, but many of the standout moments are the beats of silence between the text.

There are many different individual pieces to this document. Ware indicates that you can read them in any order. I imagine that could be a lot of fun, but being someone who enjoys a certain amount of mentoring, I found a suggested reading order on the Web that was quite effective. For those who might also want some guidance it can be found here: http://joglikescomics.blogspot.com/20...

[Althea J. · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book gets all the stars.

Wow! Not only a crazy-innovative, unconventional format for telling stories with sequential art, but the actual stories are substantive and brilliantly insightful, AND the art is simplistically fantastic.

Each story adds so much color, fleshing out the history of a woman's life. And Chris Ware uses the graphic format to penetrate life on the surface and get into this woman's head in a way that is unique to the medium he is using. I LOVE BOOKS THAT RAISE THE BAR OF WHAT A GRAPHIC NOVEL CAN ACHIEVE.

It's hard for me to wrap my brain around the fact that Chris Ware is male... he brings to light the experience of this woman in such a real way. Building Stories made me think about my own past relationships, the physical buildings I've inhabited, the concerns that run through my head, and the nature of memory and time and what drives a life.

I can't say enough about what a fulfilling reading experience this was. I'm so happy Building Stories exists!

[Pixelina · Rating 4 out of 5]

First impressions - Wow this is heavy!
Last impressions - Still heavy.
To label this as 'comics' as I did here is wrong on so many levels. But it is the word I picked for graphic novels, even though this is outside of that shelf too. This is like a box of melancholy, slices of lives lived in an apartment building in just on the outskirts of Chicago.

We follow the lives of the old landlady, the amputee woman dreaming of love, and of a young couple disappointed in how partnership turned out to be so flat, so filled with resentment. And the building itself dreaming of times past, of the men who bashed in the doors and the womens gentler touches.

The format is innovative, it makes for a story that goes back on itself and twists and turns but lands in a sense of fullness. Satiated.

[Scottsdale Public Library]

The most interesting approach to a book I have ever encountered. This book rejects typical formatting and is comprised of 14 different pieces in various forms documenting three different lives in a Chicago apartment building. There is no designated order much like receiving snippets and specific memories of the residents featured. They all live such different lives but share a common undercurrent of emotion. Take a night to spread it out on a table and see how the story unfolds for you!

-Lisanne

[Jeffrey · Rating 5 out of 5]

An amazing piece of art/literature that works on so many levels, absolutely brilliant and affecting and beautiful. From the box to each of the books/object within, each element works together and independently to build enough story for many years' worth of rewarding re-reads...