The images will fester: Ms Banerjee taking over the arrangements Ms Banerjee shouting over the mike Ms Banerjee behaving like a police officer controlling the crowd Ms Banerjee walking in the funeral procession of a man for whom she had little truck when he was alive. The chief minister tried to make a spectacle out of a tragedy.
What followed was an exhibition of sheer bad taste. But having first remained indifferent to the death of Bengal’s most popular writer, she decided on the day of the funeral to go into overdrive. Under the circumstances, it would have been proper of Ms Banerjee to offer her condolences as the chief minister, to present a wreath and to issue a short statement. She removed him with some alacrity from the only government post he held and he remained a critic of her brand of paribartan. She was no friend and admirer of the author neither was Gangopadhyay a part of her so-called cultural entourage. Mamata Banerjee’s self-appointed role in the funeral of Sunil Gangopadhyay is an illustration of the point being made. Political parties, hungry for mileage and spectacle, appropriate death when it strikes the good and the great. (It’s also about getting married, having children, friends and parents dying, losing a sense of one’s purpose, and abandoning creative ambition.)ĭeath cannot be proud in West Bengal. Ware spoke to the Los Angeles Review of Books about his process, his ideas, and his belief in the supremacy of the book.Ĭasey Burchby: Did this story germinate in a piecemeal way, as reflected in the way it’s organized in the final book? Or were you filling in a larger story as you worked on it?Ĭhris Ware: The book is pretty piecemeal, really a collection of short stories, or memories - an attempt to get at something of the way one stores away, recalls and rewrites one’s experiences, however disgustingly pretentious that might sound. Within a large, decorative box are fourteen separate but inter-related “units” of different formats - pamphlets, newspapers, hardcover books, and even a Little Golden Book-style children’s book - across which Ware depicts the stories of a group of apartment dwellers, each of whom develops distinct emotional mechanisms for dealing with loneliness, regret, and memory.
His new “publishing experiment,” as he calls it, is Building Stories, a book Publishers Weekly declared “one of the year’s best arguments for the survival of print.”īuilding Stories is both a collection and a magnum opus, a mosaic both intimate and epic. The Life Cycle of the Cartoonist: An Interview with Chris WareĪS HE DEMONSTRATES with every one of his droll, moving, meticulous publications, Chris Ware is one of the most fascinating storytellers we have, one dedicated to extending and elasticizing the medium of cartooning.
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