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A review by steveatwaywords
Building Stories by Chris Ware
challenging
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
4.5
Ware's work - outside of its expensive ingenuity - is both a delightful experience and an unsettling reverie of the process of narrative from an American middle class. Anxious, self-justifying, obsessive, near-sighted, narcissistic, and wounded, its characters live forever in a state of "wants." Some of these needs are absolutely vital in compassion, simplicity, and love. Others are idiosyncratic manufactures of the culture we have built around ourselves; and it is these last which always threaten to overwhelm, to submerge us in despair, to drive us apart. All of them, regardless, ring true for the narratives of expectation which have been built for us, and that we ourselves build.
A reader approaching this self-assembled plot should obviously not expect (necessarily) a set of traditional story arcs. Instead, what emerges are patterns and intersections of story across generations--in some key moments, where parallel choices led to greater moments of wonder or years of despair. Enter and exit where we wish, each part of this mosaic emerges as it will.
That the story is "reader-built," then, is more structurally a clever authorial strategy than one of real satisfaction of experience, where a new meaning emerges depending upon the approach. Once the building and its character have emptied their secrets, one does not enter again as the same reader. So while I truly enjoyed the experience of reading these fragments (some in incomparably tiny type, however!), I wonder if the pay-off was worth the price of manufacture.
A reader approaching this self-assembled plot should obviously not expect (necessarily) a set of traditional story arcs. Instead, what emerges are patterns and intersections of story across generations--in some key moments, where parallel choices led to greater moments of wonder or years of despair. Enter and exit where we wish, each part of this mosaic emerges as it will.
That the story is "reader-built," then, is more structurally a clever authorial strategy than one of real satisfaction of experience, where a new meaning emerges depending upon the approach. Once the building and its character have emptied their secrets, one does not enter again as the same reader. So while I truly enjoyed the experience of reading these fragments (some in incomparably tiny type, however!), I wonder if the pay-off was worth the price of manufacture.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Suicide, Sexual content, and Death