But his girlfriend makes it too easy for him to behave badly, trapped as she is in a waiting room of futile hope (every weekend, or so she thinks, is the one when he'll start being nice to her again). He's a vile man, his muffled insults seeping through the building's too-thin floors. He works nights, the better to avoid his girlfriend, whose weight gain repulses him. She inherited it from her parents, at which point her spinsterhood, which might have been only temporary, calcified into permanence. On the ground floor of the building is the old lady who owns it. As Philip Larkin had it: 'Home is so sad.' Like the crumbling building at his story's heart, it's a repository of misery, loneliness and misunderstandings. Ware's box, then, isn't a gimmick, but a sort of proxy. But they work together, too, combining to depict, in rich and multifaceted fashion, the mostly unhappy lives of the inhabitants of a single Chicago apartment block. Each one of these stands alone, and since – in theory – they may be read in any order, several members of a comic-loving family could happily read Building Stories over the course of the same afternoon. Inside, are 14 'distinctively discrete' books and pamphlets of varying sizes. The work is full of insight, beauty and fun.C hris Ware's new graphic novel comes in a cardboard box, like BS Johnson's The Unfortunates, or an old-fashioned board game.

One immediately empathizes with Ware's characters, even (and perhaps especially), Branford, The Best Bee In The World. The random arrangement of stories is more than a mere gimmick - it enhances the sense of objectivity of moral pity. The artwork is not only strong, it fits, in each case, the message and theme of each individual piece. In tone and theme it reminds me of Kieslowski's 'Decalogue' series, which was itself inspired by the security cameras on Communist Poland - that sense of recording everything objectively is present in Ware's work, also. The title is a pun, meaning (among other things) 'creating stories', 'stories that build (in sequence)', 'stories that build (character)' and 'the stories as told by. Review 2: This is a book about the world from the 'God's Eye View' perspective. I don't want to say anything about it, it's that magical. It's like a meta-heart in a box, made of stories that draw and grieve the realest stuff of life. This book is the only thing I've read in a very, very long time that I want to give to everyone I've ever met-and I say that as a girl who loves books more than anything. Review 1: I can count on my fingers and toes the number of books I've read in my adult life that have allowed me to visit the kind of completely impenetrable thrill I experienced regularly as a young reader.

Building stories by chris ware