A woman tries, and fails, to do up her jeans. A lavatory floods, and induces in its owner an existential crisis. Lives are thrown wide open, the private moments no one ever sees brought carefully out into the light. But they also, in this instance, call to mind windows Building Stories is such an intimate book that to read it is to feel like a Peeping Tom.
Ware's trademark frames are tiny and rigid, confining his characters every bit as much as their too-small bathrooms and their stifling romantic lives. When I opened one of the 14 books, and found she wasn't in it, I felt disappointed, longing to get back to her. Finally, there's the top floor, which is rented by a young, single art student (well, she's young and single in some of the books, and not-so-young and not-so-single in others), and it's with this woman, who lost her left leg below the knee as a child, that you feel Ware's interest really lies. When he tells her that he despises her trousers or her skirt, she wriggles out of them obediently, as if by shedding her clothes she will also shed her misery. 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. C hris Ware's new graphic novel comes in a cardboard box, like BS Johnson's The Unfortunates, or an old-fashioned board game.
0 kommentar(er)
