![]() 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. ![]()
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