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Presents an illustrated tale, told in various books and folded sheets, about the residents in a three-story Chicago apartment building, including a lonely single woman, a couple who are growing to despise each other, and an elderly landlady.Tags
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sweetiegherkin Both are graphic novels (although Building Stories is a more complex with its multiple parts) with female protagonists who feel lonely and isolated. Both are imbued with a sense of pathos, although Shoplifter has a more optimistic ending and bits of humor throughout than does Building Stories, whereas the latter has a larger scope in its storytelling, following the protagonist for a longer period of time.
Member Reviews
WOW. I was a big fan of Ware's earlier book Jimmy Corrigan, but this latest one seems like a leap beyond. It plays a lot more notes than Corrigan's meditation on lonely behaviors, and the playfulness is put to a lot better use. The term "book" is a little loose in this case, since Stories comes as a giant box loaded with everything from small pamphlets to a giant board that folds out as if you were going to play a board game.
These are weird and bad comparisons to use, but the whole thing feels like my favorite part of Infinite Jest: the middle-third where you get 20-30 page jags of some of the best writing you've ever seen, going on for hundreds of pages, seemingly (and pleasurably) without end. Of course, IJ has to come to an ending of show more sorts, but because Stories is in a dozen different pieces in no particular order, there's this very real feeling that it truly is endless, that you could loop back around to read them in a different order and forever stay in that zone.
The other comparison I would make is to Edward P. Jones' The Known World, which has these wild leaps in time, even in the middle of a sentence. You get the feeling that Jones has imagined his character's entire lives into the future, and that's a similar impression to what Ware brings. Pieces are set as early as the '40s and as late as the modern day, covering different spans of memory and time. One memorable piece—and probably the best to orient yourself by—covers 24 hours and is patterned after the Little Golden Books of my childhood, with the gold spine and hard cover.
Pro-tip: I read from smallest to largest, and left the giant-but-thin (as opposed to giant-but-many-pages) newspaper thing for last. It was a good accidental decision and a great closer for a line of dialogue that's borderline fourth-wall at the end. :) show less
These are weird and bad comparisons to use, but the whole thing feels like my favorite part of Infinite Jest: the middle-third where you get 20-30 page jags of some of the best writing you've ever seen, going on for hundreds of pages, seemingly (and pleasurably) without end. Of course, IJ has to come to an ending of show more sorts, but because Stories is in a dozen different pieces in no particular order, there's this very real feeling that it truly is endless, that you could loop back around to read them in a different order and forever stay in that zone.
The other comparison I would make is to Edward P. Jones' The Known World, which has these wild leaps in time, even in the middle of a sentence. You get the feeling that Jones has imagined his character's entire lives into the future, and that's a similar impression to what Ware brings. Pieces are set as early as the '40s and as late as the modern day, covering different spans of memory and time. One memorable piece—and probably the best to orient yourself by—covers 24 hours and is patterned after the Little Golden Books of my childhood, with the gold spine and hard cover.
Pro-tip: I read from smallest to largest, and left the giant-but-thin (as opposed to giant-but-many-pages) newspaper thing for last. It was a good accidental decision and a great closer for a line of dialogue that's borderline fourth-wall at the end. :) show less
It's an epic creation in terms of its scope, so let me start there.
Ten years in the making, Chris Ware's story-experience-in-a-box (I just can't call it a book, and neither could the judges in the Tournament of Books, who ultimately voted it down due to its lack of resemblance to a book) defies the traditional linear notion of a story. I'm not talking about chronology; authors mess with timelines all the time with varying levels of success, but Ware's fourteen-piece story has no particular beginning or end. Open the box and start wherever you want; your understanding of the characters and their lives and emotions and thoughts will form one brick at a time, no matter in what order you choose to read the parts. It's almost as though show more instead of hearing a story told, you're seeing it...built. It seems similar to the way we construct our identities in life: there's no specific, rational plan so much as there is a back-and-forth of new experiences and reflections on old ones.
"Building" in the title also refers to the three-story apartment building where the characters’ lives converge. At moments, Ware even gives the building its own turn at narration (in a transparently opinionated voice, which seems counterintuitive; I’d expected the building to be the only objective narrator).
Although I granted Building Stories four stars (and even teetered on five) for its ambition, creative genius, and technical skill, if I had graded it on how much I actually enjoyed “reading” it, I would have to give it…maybe one and a half. It’s just sort of anticlimactic (and really, how can a story with no prescribed order really have an effective climax?). It’s also outrageously depressing.
In some ways, reading this was like watching Avatar. It was one brilliant creator’s decade-long project, an innovative offering that was supposed to blow the minds of those who experienced it. But even though I can appreciate all that…I just didn’t much care for it. show less
Ten years in the making, Chris Ware's story-experience-in-a-box (I just can't call it a book, and neither could the judges in the Tournament of Books, who ultimately voted it down due to its lack of resemblance to a book) defies the traditional linear notion of a story. I'm not talking about chronology; authors mess with timelines all the time with varying levels of success, but Ware's fourteen-piece story has no particular beginning or end. Open the box and start wherever you want; your understanding of the characters and their lives and emotions and thoughts will form one brick at a time, no matter in what order you choose to read the parts. It's almost as though show more instead of hearing a story told, you're seeing it...built. It seems similar to the way we construct our identities in life: there's no specific, rational plan so much as there is a back-and-forth of new experiences and reflections on old ones.
"Building" in the title also refers to the three-story apartment building where the characters’ lives converge. At moments, Ware even gives the building its own turn at narration (in a transparently opinionated voice, which seems counterintuitive; I’d expected the building to be the only objective narrator).
Although I granted Building Stories four stars (and even teetered on five) for its ambition, creative genius, and technical skill, if I had graded it on how much I actually enjoyed “reading” it, I would have to give it…maybe one and a half. It’s just sort of anticlimactic (and really, how can a story with no prescribed order really have an effective climax?). It’s also outrageously depressing.
In some ways, reading this was like watching Avatar. It was one brilliant creator’s decade-long project, an innovative offering that was supposed to blow the minds of those who experienced it. But even though I can appreciate all that…I just didn’t much care for it. show less
In a large box, itself a witty graphic work of art, the reader discovers 14 discrete graphic publications ranging from books to folded “strips”. Everything, as billed, that the reader might need for building stories. This is Chris Ware at his finest, challenging the very form of the graphic novel perhaps to breaking point. There is no set route through the items contained in the box. The reader could choose any order. But of course there is a linear progression for many of the works since they follow a woman from youth to lonely adulthood, marriage, and motherhood. Other items concentrate on Brandford, The Bee. But all of them intersect at points and nothing is entirely isolated. And that might be Chris Ware’s overall theme, since show more the loneliness and self-loathing that the main character experiences are self-inflicted. Connectedness comes in many forms. And even when we feel most isolated and alone, one step back reveals an intricate pattern of lines linking, waxing and waning perhaps but still connecting, each of us to a host of others. It’s almost as though we can’t help building stories.
Of course this being a Chris Ware work, you also expect punning turns. And sure enough, at least some of the publications focus instead on the building in which the main character lives for a time.That building itself has an architectural and a social history and the story it could tell about life in Chicago over the course of a century would be just as fascinating, perhaps, as any story that focused on one of its inhabitants. But here too connectedness to a wider frame — the social architecture of an American century — draws our building into the lives of its inhabitants.
The tone across these works is nostalgic but melancholic. And although there are bright moments, even hopefulness, there are an equal number of dark moments and despair. What can’t be ignored, however, is the sheer audacity of producing such an artwork in an age of disposable literature and incorporeal “e”-books. Chris Ware and his publishers have re-established the necessity of physical publication and reconfirmed the notion that great literature is a treasure worthy of indefinite shelf life. But you’ll need an awfully big shelf for this box of wonders. Recommended. show less
Of course this being a Chris Ware work, you also expect punning turns. And sure enough, at least some of the publications focus instead on the building in which the main character lives for a time.That building itself has an architectural and a social history and the story it could tell about life in Chicago over the course of a century would be just as fascinating, perhaps, as any story that focused on one of its inhabitants. But here too connectedness to a wider frame — the social architecture of an American century — draws our building into the lives of its inhabitants.
The tone across these works is nostalgic but melancholic. And although there are bright moments, even hopefulness, there are an equal number of dark moments and despair. What can’t be ignored, however, is the sheer audacity of producing such an artwork in an age of disposable literature and incorporeal “e”-books. Chris Ware and his publishers have re-established the necessity of physical publication and reconfirmed the notion that great literature is a treasure worthy of indefinite shelf life. But you’ll need an awfully big shelf for this box of wonders. Recommended. show less
OK, are you ready to take on a reading experience unlike any you've had before? Building Stories, by Chris Ware, was ten years in the making, and comes in multiple pieces in a Monopoly-size box. You won't find this one available on Kindle. It's not an off-sthe-shelf graphic novel, it's 14 different pieces: three are like magazines, two pamphlets, four are newspaper-sized, two are comic strips, there's a little storyboard, a hardbound book and one that's reminiscent of the Golden Books of your childhood. As you may have guessed, the title reflects two meanings: the reader builds stories from these materials, and these are stories that begin in a single building. Ware takes us inside the lives of four tenants of a Chicago apartment show more building: the elderly landlady who charges less than she might to make sure the building is full, a couple at odds over life's disappointments, and the character that captivates us the most, a young woman who has a prosthetic leg and had always wanted to be an artist. They rarely interact with one another, but play out their lives in their own graphic boxes.
In reviews I've read about this book, words and phrases that come up repeatedly are "architectural", "precise", "bleak", and "lives of quiet desperation." These might be best described as interlocking short stories. They aren't fairy tales with happy endings, but sympathetic, empathetic depictions of normal people with normal desires who are stymied by life, unable to fulfill their dreams, self-aware but self-imprisoned. I kept wanting to help them out some way, and then having to remind myself that they were just color on paper. The graphic format takes you right inside their lives, and the experience of building the stories from the parts you're given draws you in further.
Much of Ware's brilliance may lie in his subtlety, and ability to tell a story economically. We see much of the couple's relationship in only a few panels, as the man's youthful hopes and dreams dissipate and he takes it out on her, not even realizing how insulting he is or the sorrow he's creating. In another story, a woman at a party needs a trip to the bathroom to slip away from a character obliviously venting at length her obsession with the death of a neglected friend.
The would-be artist captures the reader's heart, as in books, pamphlets and newspaper-sized stories she encounters life's ups and downs, learning to enjoy sex, losing her parents, perceiving herself as a failure as an artist, getting married and moving to the suburbs, and seeing her marriage deteriorate. Her struggles with physical (she's a city girl at heart) and spiritual displacement is always accompanied by the practicality of her dealing with having a prosthetic leg. Because of the piece-together-the parts nature of this work, it took me a while to learn why she was missing a leg - was she born without it, did she lose it through disease, or was there an accident?
There are currents of happiness that occasionally surface in the bleakness - for example, her love for her daughter shines, and their playing together outside one day is beautiful and affecting. Brightly colored tales of Branford the Bee remind us of the importance of awareness, including self-awareness. Beyond his obsessions with sex and food, Branford has virtually no understanding of himself or his surroundings. In one sequence he cannot understand that he's trapped in a basement, looking out a window at the flowers he desires. All he knows is something inexplicable (could it be God?) is keeping him from the flowers, something he keeps bumping against but cannot overcome.
This is a challenging read, both conceptually as you read the various parts and piece them together, and because these lives are not easy ones. Loneliness, dissatisfaction, social yearning and social awkwardness, failures to meet dreams or at times to accomplish even simple tasks, permeate these stories. But it all rings true, and fills you in the way the best art does. Ware has constructed a building, and its encapsulated lives, for your exploration. The bleakness will be off-putting for some, the unusual format or use of graphics for others, but if you're game, it's a top to bottom brilliant experience. show less
In reviews I've read about this book, words and phrases that come up repeatedly are "architectural", "precise", "bleak", and "lives of quiet desperation." These might be best described as interlocking short stories. They aren't fairy tales with happy endings, but sympathetic, empathetic depictions of normal people with normal desires who are stymied by life, unable to fulfill their dreams, self-aware but self-imprisoned. I kept wanting to help them out some way, and then having to remind myself that they were just color on paper. The graphic format takes you right inside their lives, and the experience of building the stories from the parts you're given draws you in further.
Much of Ware's brilliance may lie in his subtlety, and ability to tell a story economically. We see much of the couple's relationship in only a few panels, as the man's youthful hopes and dreams dissipate and he takes it out on her, not even realizing how insulting he is or the sorrow he's creating. In another story, a woman at a party needs a trip to the bathroom to slip away from a character obliviously venting at length her obsession with the death of a neglected friend.
The would-be artist captures the reader's heart, as in books, pamphlets and newspaper-sized stories she encounters life's ups and downs, learning to enjoy sex, losing her parents, perceiving herself as a failure as an artist, getting married and moving to the suburbs, and seeing her marriage deteriorate. Her struggles with physical (she's a city girl at heart) and spiritual displacement is always accompanied by the practicality of her dealing with having a prosthetic leg. Because of the piece-together-the parts nature of this work, it took me a while to learn why she was missing a leg - was she born without it, did she lose it through disease, or was there an accident?
There are currents of happiness that occasionally surface in the bleakness - for example, her love for her daughter shines, and their playing together outside one day is beautiful and affecting. Brightly colored tales of Branford the Bee remind us of the importance of awareness, including self-awareness. Beyond his obsessions with sex and food, Branford has virtually no understanding of himself or his surroundings. In one sequence he cannot understand that he's trapped in a basement, looking out a window at the flowers he desires. All he knows is something inexplicable (could it be God?) is keeping him from the flowers, something he keeps bumping against but cannot overcome.
This is a challenging read, both conceptually as you read the various parts and piece them together, and because these lives are not easy ones. Loneliness, dissatisfaction, social yearning and social awkwardness, failures to meet dreams or at times to accomplish even simple tasks, permeate these stories. But it all rings true, and fills you in the way the best art does. Ware has constructed a building, and its encapsulated lives, for your exploration. The bleakness will be off-putting for some, the unusual format or use of graphics for others, but if you're game, it's a top to bottom brilliant experience. show less
Chris Ware's Building Stories is a graphic novel presented in a boxed set of 14 connected but not connected stories, told through various types of formats. In the box you will find pamphlets of various sizes, a book that resembles an over-sized Golden Book, a couple of softcover books, one clothbound hardcover book, a newspaper, a board that resembles the board from a board game, and a handful of other layouts. Not one of these needs to be read in order as you find them in the box (even though that's how I read it), but as you read them, they all find a way to interconnect to tell a story greater than their individual parts, hence you're building the story.
Building Stories is the story about a three-flat apartment building in Chicago show more and the people that live there: the elderly landlady, the married/possibly not married couple on the second floor who never seem to be happy with each other, and an amputee who lives on the third floor, and chose to live there as a means of getting exercise due to her lost leg. There is nothing fanciful in these people's stories; there is nothing idyllic about their lives. If anything, this is the only complaint that I have with the story as a whole: nobody ever really seems to be happy. I know that Ware is trying to show people and their real lives, but as I finished reading, I was filled more with a morose feeling than anything else. Don't get me wrong, the emotions that Ware is able to pull from his simplistic art and bare dialogue is astonishing, I guess I just wish there was something of a "happy ending" in the book, even though there is no true ending per se. We see certain parts of the character's lives, but like any life that we witness from the outside, I still think there is so much more to the characters than what we have been shown. We are presented with snippets of their past and present, but we don't really know what their future holds, much like any person that we may know. I think I would be interested to see Ware revisit these characters in a couple of years, and show us where their lives took them.
I'm torn on whether I want to read anything else by Ware. There was such a pervading sense of melancholy throughout the entire collection, I don't know that I would trust anything else of his to not have that same feeling throughout. Yet, he presents these emotions so well that I think it would be a shame not to read something else of his again sometime. Maybe I just need to give myself some time to absorb everything from Building Stories before I move on to anything else of his, as I think this story is going to stick with me for some time. show less
Building Stories is the story about a three-flat apartment building in Chicago show more and the people that live there: the elderly landlady, the married/possibly not married couple on the second floor who never seem to be happy with each other, and an amputee who lives on the third floor, and chose to live there as a means of getting exercise due to her lost leg. There is nothing fanciful in these people's stories; there is nothing idyllic about their lives. If anything, this is the only complaint that I have with the story as a whole: nobody ever really seems to be happy. I know that Ware is trying to show people and their real lives, but as I finished reading, I was filled more with a morose feeling than anything else. Don't get me wrong, the emotions that Ware is able to pull from his simplistic art and bare dialogue is astonishing, I guess I just wish there was something of a "happy ending" in the book, even though there is no true ending per se. We see certain parts of the character's lives, but like any life that we witness from the outside, I still think there is so much more to the characters than what we have been shown. We are presented with snippets of their past and present, but we don't really know what their future holds, much like any person that we may know. I think I would be interested to see Ware revisit these characters in a couple of years, and show us where their lives took them.
I'm torn on whether I want to read anything else by Ware. There was such a pervading sense of melancholy throughout the entire collection, I don't know that I would trust anything else of his to not have that same feeling throughout. Yet, he presents these emotions so well that I think it would be a shame not to read something else of his again sometime. Maybe I just need to give myself some time to absorb everything from Building Stories before I move on to anything else of his, as I think this story is going to stick with me for some time. show less
Stunning. As an artistic and a mental exercise, the book -- a collection of 14 different types of graphic narrative, from long, horizontal stand-alone comic strips to children's books to newspapers to a huge gameboard-like fold-out -- is a marvel of construction. And as a composite narrative (the more accurate but less attractive term for "story cycle" or "novel-in-stories," but never has "composite narrative" so aptly fit a work of fiction), this book is a mind-boggling piece of ingenuity, with each separate item in the book informing and overlapping on each other, and all the orbital stories circling back into the main narrative as well. It doesn't matter which order you read the stories in or how many times you read -- and this will show more reward re-reading -- the mental exercises and hidden surprises available in this work are exhilarating.
But that's not why I love Chris Ware. I love Chris Ware because he writes so beautifully and honestly about the basic, ordinary human experience that he renders the mundane sublime and heart-shattering. His book Jimmy Corrigan was the first that ever caused me to break open in wracking sobs, and Building Stories did it again. I sat at my kitchen with pieces of the book open before me and I quaked from crying. My toes shook.
And I felt so... known... afterward. It's a kind of compassion that Ware accomplishes in writing these stories. A kind of perfect empathy. You weep because you know that someone out there understands life -- your life -- so well that he has managed to put it into words and images, even if the people look a little different, if the circumstances aren't exactly the same. He knows how you feel or have felt or will feel. And you will love him for it. show less
But that's not why I love Chris Ware. I love Chris Ware because he writes so beautifully and honestly about the basic, ordinary human experience that he renders the mundane sublime and heart-shattering. His book Jimmy Corrigan was the first that ever caused me to break open in wracking sobs, and Building Stories did it again. I sat at my kitchen with pieces of the book open before me and I quaked from crying. My toes shook.
And I felt so... known... afterward. It's a kind of compassion that Ware accomplishes in writing these stories. A kind of perfect empathy. You weep because you know that someone out there understands life -- your life -- so well that he has managed to put it into words and images, even if the people look a little different, if the circumstances aren't exactly the same. He knows how you feel or have felt or will feel. And you will love him for it. show less
Thoroughly depressing, but quite brilliant graphic novel, produced as a collection of small books, newspapers, folded strips of paper, etc. There are no instructions on how to read all of this (I did it from small to large). A slices of life story with a triple pun on the title; the building itself is a character. Includes the story of Branford bee, the greatest bee in the world, and an edition of the Bee times with "God save the queen" in the header. I think the only other graphic novels I had read were Art Spiegleman's Maus I and II, but now I am intrigued...
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Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- Building Stories
- Original publication date
- 2012
- Epigraph
- Don't forget to go outside of the house once in a while or you'll lose your source of pollination.
-Clara Louise Ware (1905 - 1990)
Everything you can imagine is real.
- Pablo Picasso (1881 - 1973) - Dedication
- For Marnie, Clara and Mom.
- First words
- Second picture strip: "I don't care. I just don't care."
- Quotations
- This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are employed deceptively. Any resemblance to actual living, dead or insensate persons, events muni... (show all)cipalities, locales, historical figures, emotions, sensations or unnameable poetic impressions is entirely coincidental, or at least not deliberately intended to catalyze litigation.
(Printed inside the cover of the box)
I already felt like a statue that'd stood in one place for too long, blackened by time, passers-by not even looking up at me or remembering why I was there ...
They all felt behind me, anyway, a past I was no longer a part of ... and what did I have to look forward to? - Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)The last folded graphics "comic": "Will I be the most important thing you ever do?"
Classifications
- Genre
- Graphic Novels & Comics
- DDC/MDS
- 741.5 — Arts & recreation Drawing & decorative arts Drawing Comic books, graphic novels, fotonovelas, cartoons, caricatures, comic strips
- LCC
- PN6727 .W285 .B85 — Language and Literature Literature (General) Literature (General) Collections of general literature Comic books, strips, etc.
- BISAC
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- (4.41)
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- English, French, German, Italian
- Media
- Paper
- ISBNs
- 6
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- 3