The Star Online: Lifestyle: Bookshelf
The Star Online: Lifestyle: Bookshelf |
- A decade of Chris Ware’s work in Building Stories
- The Expats is everyone’s idea of a breathless page-turner
- Case of poor chemistry
| A decade of Chris Ware’s work in Building Stories Posted: 22 Mar 2013 07:22 AM PDT Who says ordinary life has to be boring? This new graphic novel makes normal seem fascinating. CHRIS Ware's Building Stories is a "graphic novel" unlike any other. It consists of 14 "distinctively discrete books, booklets, magazines, newspapers and pamphlets" about the occupants of a three-storey apartment building in Chicago. Just unpacking the large, beautifully designed box it comes in was an experience – from discovering a large broadsheet "newspaper" to hardcover books and tiny little comic strips, it felt like I was opening a treasure chest full of mundane yet fascinating wonders. Building Stories collects an entire decade of Ware's work, some previously unpublished, others having appeared in esteemed publications like The New Yorker, The New York Times and McSweeney's Quarterly Comics. The critically acclaimed Ware is also the creator of graphic novels Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid On Earth and The Acme Novelty Library series. The sheer amount of content in the Building Stories box was overwhelming at first. Although the publishers helpfully provided suggestions on how to read it, I was still unsure about where to start. In the end, I started with the biggest piece of the puzzle – a huge cardboard foldout with four pages and blueprints of the building at the back. Almost wordless, with whimsical little pictures and arrows pointing all over the place, it turned out to be the piece that intrigued me the most and drew me deeper into the lives of the inhabitants of this building. It's amazing how those four wordless pages of hard cardboard with colourful little pictures could be so engrossing. I found myself feeling sorry for the lonely one-legged girl's depression after turning up for a blind date and getting stood up; getting angry at the husband on the second floor's impure thoughts about the one-legged girl; feeling a sense of what might have been for the old landlady on the ground floor who missed her chance at love years ago; and strangely, a whimsical touch of grief and alarm for the life (and sudden SPLAT) of a little bee and his family. After those wordless four pages (which I pored over for almost an hour, admiring the details in the drawings and trying to draw more stories from it), I moved on to the next hardcover piece of the puzzle, which turned out to be the heart-rending tale of the one-legged girl's mundane and lonely life. Other stories in the collection include a day in lives of the building's occupants, giving us fascinatingly detailed perspectives of the old landlady, the married couple and the lonely girl (which are bookended by the thoughts of the building itself), a collection of strips that follows the childhood of the one-legged girl's daughter; as well as the amusingly whimsical tale of Branford, The Best Bee In The World. These snippets of the little bee's life are some of the more light-hearted tales in Building Stories, and cover Branford's life from his birth, on to his awakening as Branford, the Bee with a Developing Moral Conscience, his marriage to Betty the bee, and finally, his ultimate fate of being squashed (thus becoming Branford the Benevolent Bacterium). It's a bittersweet tale that is probably the cutest yet most philosophical story ever written about a bee. Artistically, Ware's clean, almost retro artwork is so jam-packed with details that you can't help but study each and every panel. He manages to make even the most mundane of details fascinating – a ribbon stuck in a vent, the arrangement of flowers in a vase, a hook stuck in the wall ... Ware's characters ponder little ordinary things like these, and he dedicates whole pages to these mundane sorts of things you see every day but never bothered to dwell on. It's almost as if Ware decided to take everything we usually take for granted and make us care more about it. Sure, there are no superheroes or world-threatening crises in here; but Ware's stories are so fascinating that you can't help but keep reading just to find out more about his characters' lives. After almost half a day of eavesdropping on their intimate conversations, sharing their innermost thoughts and feeling their loneliness and depression, I felt as though I had practically lived the lives of these ordinary folk. Philosophical, whimsical, and incomparable, this may be a book about mundane ordinary life, but Ware manages to find and tell the most interesting stories ever about mundane, boring, and ordinary life. Building Stories isn't a just a story about life, it's a story about how to live life, and I couldn't recommend it more. > Building Stories is available at Kinokuniya, Suria KLCC. |
| The Expats is everyone’s idea of a breathless page-turner Posted: 22 Mar 2013 07:19 AM PDT This is a book that is very well written, has convincing characters, an intriguing plot and a surprise a minute. The Expats FROM time to time, one comes across a first novel that is almost indecently accomplished. I suppose the fact that The Expats is published by Faber & Faber should have been warning enough that this was a book likely to exceed expectations. As one of the world's most venerable independent publishing houses (their list includes five Booker Prize winners and 12 Nobel laureates!), they have a reputation to maintain. At first glance, a thriller set in Luxembourg is some way adrift of the fairly erudite titles on which Faber has built its reputation. For The Expats is an out-and-out thriller, a tale of deception and double-crossing, of deviousness, subterfuge and greed. In short, The Expats is everyone's idea of a breathless page-turner – and a very good one at that. Good enough, in fact, for Chris Pavone to have attracted the attention of one of the world's great publishing houses. Kate Moore is a working mother with a deep dark secret. Now desk bound, she has in her recent past been a full-blown CIA operative whose fieldwork operations have included assassination. She is a highly-skilled agent who is clearly exhilarated by the thrill of dangerous undercover work. How, then, will she adapt to expat life in Luxembourg where her computer nerd of a husband, Dexter, has just been offered a very lucrative job? Predictably, the answer is "not very well". Kate will get bored with the rounds of school playground gossip, drinks parties, barbeques, and tennis. And so, when another American couple, Julia and Bill, take an unusual interest in her and Dexter's life, Kate's investigative instincts are aroused. It takes one to know one, they say, and so it proves for Kate. The more contact she has with Julia and Bill, the more convinced she becomes that they are not the normal expats they at first appear to be. Worse, she fears that they may be investigating her for events connected to her previous CIA role. The twists in the plot start early. Kate has never told Dexter of her past and she is reluctant to open up now. So, whatever suspicions she has about Bill and Julia have either to be kept secret or parcelled up and presented to Dexter in "innocent" terms. But then, Dexter is also behaving a little oddly. He is abnormally vague about what exactly he does for a living ("computer security systems"), unwilling to tell her who actually employs him ("the client"), and guarded about the purpose of his steadily expanding travel itineraries. When Kate breaks into his office and discovers a set-up somewhat at odds with Dexter's description of his job, Kate knows that something odd is happening. And so it proves. So far, we have an expat mother with a CIA past, a computer nerd of a husband who is clearly not doing what he says he is, and two friends who bear an uncanny resemblance to agents. This, you might think, is complexity enough to be going on with. Not so. As in all the best thrillers, the plot thickens, the deceptions grow, and absolutely nothing is as it seems. Pavone prefaces The Expats with a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies." So, be warned: you can take nothing here at face value. Pavone is an ex-book editor who spent a year and a half in Luxembourg when his wife got a job there. He started to write The Expats in its "cobblestoned street cafes" so it is not surprising that his version of expat life rings true. And he must have had enormous fun creating what is one of the most complex plots I have come across in a long time. It is something of a cliché to claim that the plotting of a thriller is intricate because that is what, in essence, thrillers are: complex situations which someone has to pick their way through, working from the few clues they are given. That said, even by thriller standards, The Expats demands pretty close attention as twist follows twist until at the end, most readers will be scrambling backwards to tie up all the loose connections. Is it satisfying? Eminently so. A feature of the book some readers may find irritating or confusing is the time scheme. This is particularly true at the beginning when Kate flits between the present and the past. All I can advise is to keep going: things sort themselves out. That apart, I can only warmly recommend The Expats as a crackingly good read. It is very well written, has convincing characters, an intriguing plot and a surprise a minute. This is a very accomplished book from an author I am sure we are going to hear much more from – hopefully involving the very beguiling Kate Moore. |
| Posted: 22 Mar 2013 12:50 AM PDT The Statistical Probability Of Love At First Sight THE premise of this short young adult novel seemed excellent: 17-year-old Hadley Sullivan narrowly misses her flight from the United States to London, making her late for her father's wedding to a soon-to-be stepmother she has never met but already loathes. While waiting for the next flight, she meets handsome British boy Oliver, who also happens to be sitting in the same row as her on the plane. The duo talk. A lot. And snuggle. And hit it off brilliantly (or so the writer would have us believe). However, upon arriving at Heathrow, the pair lose track of each other and Hadley makes it her mission to find him again. I found this book terrible. A poor man's Before Sunrise, the plot is cheesily executed. Strained, cringe-worthy dialogue, and absolutely boring side plots just prolonged my torment. The character of Oliver falls short of being the dishy European that author Smith was obviously shooting for: he's moody and inconsistent, and no young woman should be wasting her time on such a jerk. His bad behaviour towards the end of the book is later explained away with a death in the family – but it's an excuse, not a reason. His dialogue is stilted and false-sounding – I don't actually know any British people who talk this way – and he's kind of a snob. ("You obviously do read some good literature ... I love Dickens," he says.) Hadley, too, is a pain. Come to think of it, she and Oliver would be well-suited if they didn't have such poor chemistry. She vacillates between angsting about her father's impending wedding to a really, really pleasant woman and agonising over Oliver. In between, she treats her mother poorly as well. I don't understand authors who write books for teenagers about teenagers, and then make these teenagers really bratty and cliched. Of course, as is the wont of such books, everything is neatly and nicely resolved at the end. Hadley comes to terms with her dad's marriage to the not-so-awful Charlotte, and sets off across London to find Oliver. Even this part, the part that's meant to be exciting and full of quirky Zooey Deschanel-type mix-ups, comes off as boring. Her romance with Oliver is nothing more than a cheap trick to get you to start reading – it's trite and doesn't ring true. There is little to no character development. At the start, we're presented with Hadley's emotional hang-ups: recently dumped, feeling abandoned by her father, witnessing her mother's hurt at being left for a younger woman, her dislike for her stepmother-to-be. None of these issues are satisfactorily resolved – instead, Hadley finds a new love, gets over her dislike when she meets Charlotte, and forgives her father because he "still loves her mother". What? After pages and pages of the author setting up Hadley's father as the bad guy, surprise! He isn't all bad. Why? We don't know, he just isn't. This is a good premise that has been let down by boring prose and vague, ephemeral characters. I have to say that The Statistical Probability Of Falling In Love was a dull waste of my time. |
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