Station Eleven

by Emily St. John Mandel

French language

Published Aug. 28, 2018 by Payot & Rivages.

ISBN:: 978-2-7436-4200-6

(239 reviews)

Dans un monde où la civilisation s'est effondrée suite à une pandémie foudroyante, une troupe d'acteurs et de musiciens nomadise entre de petites communautés de survivants pour leur jouer du Shakespeare. Un répertoire qui en est venu à représenter l'espoir et l'humanité au milieu de la désolation.

Finaliste du National Book Award aux États-Unis, ce roman fera date dans l'histoire de la littérature d'anticipation.

500 000 exemplaires vendus en Amérique du Nord, 150 000 dans les îles Britanniques.

113 editions

Taylor reviewed Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Review of 'Station Eleven' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

Unique and creatively told. It's well-written, gentle, nostalgic, and human-focused. The post-apocalyptic setting and its finer details take a backseat to the intertwined characters. Stated in the summary, the book revolves around a performance of Shakespeare's King Lear, and has continuous time jumps back and forth—so maybe it’s a little highbrow for me and I missed bits of brilliant underlying storytelling. My uncultured, Neanderthal self would have much preferred the conflicts about to unfold to not be interrupted with constant flashbacks.

Characters: Some are only pre-apocalypse, some only post. Yet we follow them for long amounts of time. Those in both pre and post-apocalypse go through dramatic changes, but we don’t usually get to hear much about how or why. A post-apocalyptic traveling symphony is a great concept. But I wasn’t attached to any of the characters—I couldn't picture them in my head, and wasn’t rooting for anyone to accomplish …

altlovesbooks reviewed Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Review of 'Station Eleven' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

Maybe not for everyone, but I enjoyed this book. It's like a slice of life look into the lead up to and aftermath of an apocalyptic event. The point of view hops around a bit so it can be disorienting for people expecting linear stories, but I enjoyed piecing things together. There aren't so many characters that you lose track of what's going on, and things still seem to progress at a steady pace. It's like if The Stand had better pacing.

Enno reviewed Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Review of 'Station Eleven' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

Absolutely loved it. Contender for my favorite book read in 2019.

Mark Anderson reviewed Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Review of 'Station Eleven' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

Enjoyable thought experiment on what the world might be like after a colossal epidemic. Unfortunately, my reading was a bit disjointed, due to no fault of the author, because my copy had 20 pages ripped out of it at the very end. I had to wait for a library copy to continue. So my review is not coherent and a result... But I can say it is beautifully written and if you need a captivating sci-fi read, you'll enjoy this book.

Jeff Lake reviewed Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Review of 'Station Eleven' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

If you loved The Passage, you’ll like Station Eleven. The parallels between Cronin’s book and St. John Mandel’s are so strong that a character in the latter even mentions the former (though not by name). The comparison flatters Station Eleven.

The story follows various characters before, during, and after a superflu epidemic that kills almost everybody. The narrative jumps back and forth in time, following people living their mundane lives in the years before the outbreak and trying to live any life at all in the wasteland afterward.

St. John Mandel’s prose is fluid and sometimes poetic, and her characters unfold at a comfortable pace. The book is about half contemporary character study and half post-apocalyptic survival story, and the contrast between the two worlds kept me interested when the plot didn’t.

That plot is arbitrary and mostly nonsense. Characters who don’t know each other end up having unlikely (but narratively convenient) connections to each other, and the cartoonish villains perform impossible feats in order to antagonize the heroes.

I’m pretty good at suspending my disbelief, but the setting raised too many questions for me. How could a flu virus with 24-hour lethality spread across the entire world in days? The survivors of the plague must hide from starving marauders within days of the outbreak, so what happened to all the canned food and solar panels? Why do people, 20 years later, avoid the cities? It doesn’t follow.

This all bothered me, but the book has real pleasures too: St. John Mandel’s writing flows, she strikes memorable notes of horror and grace, and her characters have life. In particular the Traveling Symphony, a troupe of actors and musicians that travel the fallen world playing concerts and performing Shakespeare “because survival is insufficient”, is a charming idea.

Its flaws sometimes obscure its merits, but if you’re a fan of both the kind of insightful character development called “literature” and post-apocalyptic survival stories, this is a pretty good instance of both.

hedgeling reviewed Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Review of 'Station Eleven' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

Beautiful and haunting

ManyRoads reviewed Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Review of 'Station Eleven' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

A most interesting diversion... the story wraps around itself numerous times and in numerous ways. The prose is well written and most of the characters are interesting and curiously linked.

the_lirazel reviewed Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Review of 'Station Eleven' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

4.5 stars

settingshadow reviewed Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Review of 'Station Eleven' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

I was initially confused about the decision to start a book that it is ultimately about the apocalypse with a tragic focus on the unrelated death of Arthur Leander. How can a personal tragedy be related to the apocalypse? How can we care when several million people are about to die? But ultimately that's kind of the point of Station Eleven. It's less about the apocalypse and more about everyone ever known to Arthur Leander in the peri-apocalyptic time from his first wife to the paramedic who tried to resuscitate him. It's a very character-focused exploration with some intertwining threads. The intense character study plays nicely with the themes of the book: not how humans survive the apocalypse, but really how humanity survives, with art and culture and museums and language. And in that, how individuals survive with their individuality. This is really a new approach to a pretty tired genre.

Sometimes, St. John Mandel is a little too on the nose, but it still usually hits home. For instance: the motto inscribed on the Symphony's van: "Survival is Insufficient," or the fact that most of the characters belong to a traveling band of Shakespearean players. It really only rankled when she tried to draw parallels between Arthur having multiple wives (sequentially) being completely accepted in the conventional time line, while the prophet's, Arthur's son (in a plot-twist I saw coming on like, page 2) multiple wives are condemned, perhaps because he has them in parallel and also, a potential wife is 12. Similarly, the ironic cross-cut from Arthur's first wife bemoaning the likelihood that Kirsten will amount to nothing with her extreme competence and self-protection in the post-apocalyptic world. We get it: some people really came into their own in an apocalypse and it provides an opportunity for humanity to be cleansed. Great.

On the whole, I found Station Eleven to be a really unique and interesting take on the post-apocalyptic genre, with some beautiful character portraits.

Jonathan reviewed Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Review of 'Station Eleven' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

I love how it focused on people and their interconnected lives in the setting of an apocalypse without focusing on the setting itself too much.

Jack Phoenix reviewed Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Review of 'Station Eleven' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

It's unlike any post-apocalyptic fiction you've ever read, which in this day of steep competition is saying a lot, and it constantly keeps one eye to the past and one to the future as it explores themes of legacy.

Laura Lemay reviewed Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Review of 'Station Eleven' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

This book is terrific.

It’s nominally an end of the world story, with a killer flu that wipes out most of the world population. There are all the usual trappings here of a dark post-apocalypse story that we’ve come to expect from the Road or the Passage or the Walking Dead. In that sense this book is nothing new, genre-wise.

But where Station Eleven succeeds is in the tight focus on the characters, all of which are family or friends or people who just had a passing encounter with one character, Arthur Leander, who dies in the first few pages.

The story weaves in and out of time before and after the apocalypse, drawing and linking the characters together in rich and complex ways, with the relationships and experiences and simple objects passed from hand to hand. (I had to go back and search for some of those objects after I had finished the book, to find the threads.) Station Eleven is one of those objects, a comic book with a dark (and somewhat obvious) metaphor that reminds me a lot of the Black Freighter story-within-a-story (also in a comic book) from Watchmen.

For a post-apocalyptic genre story it is an elegy to the world that has passed, but it is also extremely hopeful. Things fall apart after the apocalypse, and bad people do bad things, but at core we remain essentially good, we care for each other, and we rebuild. It’s a nice change from the never-ending bleakness that one often finds in these stories, and very nicely done.

It’s wonderfully written, meticulously crafted, hard to put down, and easily one of the best books I’ve read in the last year.

markm reviewed Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Review of 'Station Eleven' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

A top-notch flu-pandemic end of civilization novel that reminded me of similar novels by David Mitchell, with linked and mirrored relationships between pre and post apocalyptic characters, ways of life, and an imagined graphic novel with the same title as this novel.
The standard tropes and tensions of the apocalyptic novel that we are so familiar with, mostly from the surfeit of zombie TV shows, are used, but downplayed a little by the author's interest in a more wistful and nostalgic look at what would be lost. The literary angle of the book leads to a more positive outlook than something like Cormac McCarthy's masterpiece, The Road.
It happens every day, but I found the idea of a fragment of a long lost book affecting different people in different ages and scattered places to be both moving and encouraging.

Rainer reviewed Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Review of 'Station Eleven' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

This was the best post-apocalyptic book I've ever read. Instead of trying to scare people into the "prepper" lifestyle, it examined the world as we currently experience it.

I would recommend this book to anybody.

govmarley reviewed Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Review of 'Station Eleven' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

Dystopian, but different. No zombies. Nothing weird. Just a terrible flu that wipes out life as we knew it. Be prepared to fight urges to run to the store and stock up in case something happens.

I liked the alternating timelines. I enjoyed the characters. But in the end I was left wanting more. So many unanswered questions! I wanted a resolution.

This is not one to listen to on audio. The narrator is terrible. I believe it is the same person who read [b:If I Stay|4374400|If I Stay (If I Stay, #1)|Gayle Forman|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1347462970s/4374400.jpg|4422413] and she made me hate every single line of that book. Read the book, and skip the audio. I had to switch to fall into the world of Station Eleven.

I'm wavering between 3 1/2 stars and 4, but I'll leave it at 4 for now.