EPUB
English language
Published Sept. 9, 2014 by Alfred A. Knopf.
An audacious, darkly glittering novel set in the eerie days following civilization’s collapse, Station Eleven tells the spellbinding story of a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking everything for art and humanity.
It is fifteen years after a flu pandemic wiped out most of the world’s population. Kirsten is an actress with the Traveling Symphony, a small troupe moving over the gutted landscape, performing Shakespeare and music for scattered communities of survivors. But when they arrive in the outpost of St. Deborah by the Water, they encounter a violent prophet who digs graves for anyone who dares to leave. Spanning decades, moving back and forth in time, and vividly depicting life before and after the disaster brought everyone here, this suspenseful, elegiac novel is rife with beauty, telling a story about the relationships that sustain us.
Early on in the book St. John Mandel lists all the things we would lose if civilization collapses. Yet even as she narrates through her protagonists struggles among the ruins, she shows us, though flashbacks, how much sadder we are now—how alienated we are from each other.
Best summed up in a quote from the book: "Hell is the absence of the people you long for."
Wish it was longer! I'm so curious about this world that Mandel has created. I want to know more! I loved the interconnection between all the characters, and the mundane aspects of survival. Just people being people. Loving, remembering, fighting, surviving.
It wasn’t bad, just wasn’t really what i was expecting and I’m probably not “literary” enough for it xD
This was recommended to me and I went in knowing very little about it.
I found it to be a really gripping novel; hard to put down. I was really excited to see how the characters lives intersected and how they handled the trauma of the devastating pandemic.
The book tells the story of the characters at various stages of their lives ranging from many years before the pandemic, to around 20 years after. This gives a really interesting perspective on the characters, and keeps the pace of the book fast and interesting.
Highly recommended!
Wonderful.
I liked the book well enough, so I decided to go for 4 stars, it really drew me in most of the time.
I was on the verge of giving three because a couple of things bothered me. First, it might be a minor issue to others, but it irked me to no end: What's with the myth of being able to accurately kill someone by throwing a knife? This Hollywood trope is just not true, and is used repeatedly during the book. That's just sloppy research.
Also, it bothered me that the author called the disease the "Georgia Flu". To be fair to her, I guess the real pandemic and Trump's "Wuhan flu" are to be blamed for my feelings here, something the author could not have known at the time this book was written.
You know those what-if stories that keep you up in the middle of the night? This book is one such story.
Those who read this before March 2020, count yourselves lucky.
A really great imagining of sweeping pandemic and complete societal collapse bogged down by too many side stories of half-formed characters and convenient contrived coincidences that detract from what could have been a fantastic piece of post-apocalyptic fiction.
I enjoyed this! The story is told in cuts back and forth through time but I never got the feeling it was a gimmick. Mandel has a larger point to make. Larger, even, than the surface attraction of a post apocalyptic story.
Obviously reading this during the height of the Omicron variant is unsettling and I may have put up a few emotional blockers while getting through this however, the writing is beautiful and the plot is impressively woven.
I'll be honest, I was nervous to finally pick up an Emily St. John Mandel book. I have heard wonderful things about how she constructs her stories in a deeply introspective, yet accessible way. I was afraid Station Eleven wouldn't live up to the hype. So I was ultimately so happy to have enjoyed this book.
Station Eleven follows a few different, interconnected points of view across timelines. The central narrative straddles what is basically the end of civilization as a deadly plague ravages the world and decimates the population in a matter of weeks. We follow some characters lives before this collapse, some after, and some between the two, but all linked in unique ways.
While I did find some of the jumping to be distracting, I did enjoy every point of view and the care the author took in developing each of them. They were all beautifully written …
I'll be honest, I was nervous to finally pick up an Emily St. John Mandel book. I have heard wonderful things about how she constructs her stories in a deeply introspective, yet accessible way. I was afraid Station Eleven wouldn't live up to the hype. So I was ultimately so happy to have enjoyed this book.
Station Eleven follows a few different, interconnected points of view across timelines. The central narrative straddles what is basically the end of civilization as a deadly plague ravages the world and decimates the population in a matter of weeks. We follow some characters lives before this collapse, some after, and some between the two, but all linked in unique ways.
While I did find some of the jumping to be distracting, I did enjoy every point of view and the care the author took in developing each of them. They were all beautifully written and complex, however the main POVs were written to be a bit flawless. FYI if you prefer your characters to be a bit more rough around the edges.
Regarding the pacing, the pre-collapse chapters were deeply introspective while the post-collapse chapters had a healthy balance of action and internal monologuing. Each chapter seamlessly wove into the next one to create a very interesting web of narratives that each inform a part of the story. I found it to be very compelling and well executed.
The story itself was quite interesting. There were parts of it I found difficult to read, not because of the pandemic or the fall of civilization, but because of the depressing thought of evangelical extremism persisting after the apocalypse. I've had too much evangelical extremism in my life lately..
I was considering jumping into Sea of Tranquility right after this, but I'm now energized to pick up The Glass Hotel first to really savor St. John Mandel's writing. I can't wait to dive into her other works.
Well-written, interesting characters. A story where you can’t predict what is going to happen next.
But I didn’t really like it as a whole. It doesn’t feel like it resolves anything for putting you through the journey and ends kind of abruptly after weaving multiple stories together. It felt like none of the characters grew and like Cryptonomicon (which has a similar vibe to it), it felt like the story exists for it’s own sake of telling a bunch of other stories throughout the timeline with a disappointing common thread. The Station 11 subplot seems have no purpose, much like the book itself.
Also I read this during a deadly pandemic... so that may have shaped my opinion.
Emily St. John Mandel wrote in an article somewhere that perhaps Station Eleven is not her idea of recommended reading during a pandemic, but here I am anyway. Somehow we as social creatures are drawn to morbid and tragic media not only during the course of our mundane ordinary lives, but especially during times of distress and upheaval. It is comforting to me on one hand to read of such familiar situations and thought processes, and yet, on the other hand, to have gratitude that in many ways my world is better off than this fictional one.
Still, the characters' emotional struggles and turmoils are a sort of way for the reader to sublimate their own anxieties and stresses. Which is perhaps to say, hey, if these characters can find moments of joy and happiness in this absolute hellscape, perhaps I can too... and I've still got electricity and internet, …
Emily St. John Mandel wrote in an article somewhere that perhaps Station Eleven is not her idea of recommended reading during a pandemic, but here I am anyway. Somehow we as social creatures are drawn to morbid and tragic media not only during the course of our mundane ordinary lives, but especially during times of distress and upheaval. It is comforting to me on one hand to read of such familiar situations and thought processes, and yet, on the other hand, to have gratitude that in many ways my world is better off than this fictional one.
Still, the characters' emotional struggles and turmoils are a sort of way for the reader to sublimate their own anxieties and stresses. Which is perhaps to say, hey, if these characters can find moments of joy and happiness in this absolute hellscape, perhaps I can too... and I've still got electricity and internet, and while that lasts, more books on my Kindle that I'll ever get around to reading. Zoom meetings, hangouts, and seminars to be attended. Humans sure are a resilient bunch.
4.5. My third thoroughly enjoyable go at post-apocalyptic pandemic fiction during our current pre-apocalyptic pandemic reality.
My favourite book so far this year!! Bitter sweet, melancholic, haunting. Beautiful written & poetic Especially unsettling and relevant this year.
I'd added this to my wishlist but by the time it was available at the library, I'd forgotten whatever I'd read about it that caused me to add it. So from the title alone, I assumed it might be some kind of science fiction book set on a space station. Wrong! Although the Station Eleven in question is indeed a space station, it's one that only exists in a comic book written by a character within the book, which is set very much here and now, present day, when it starts.
This book was written in 2014, but remarkably prescient given that just 6 years later we're in the middle of a global pandemic. The book's plot revolves around a global pandemic known as the "Georgia flu". It spreads rapidly around the world through airline travel. Unlike our current pandemic, symptoms develop within 3-4 hours and most infected people die …
I'd added this to my wishlist but by the time it was available at the library, I'd forgotten whatever I'd read about it that caused me to add it. So from the title alone, I assumed it might be some kind of science fiction book set on a space station. Wrong! Although the Station Eleven in question is indeed a space station, it's one that only exists in a comic book written by a character within the book, which is set very much here and now, present day, when it starts.
This book was written in 2014, but remarkably prescient given that just 6 years later we're in the middle of a global pandemic. The book's plot revolves around a global pandemic known as the "Georgia flu". It spreads rapidly around the world through airline travel. Unlike our current pandemic, symptoms develop within 3-4 hours and most infected people die within a day, so the impact is immediate and extremely deadly, and within weeks has wiped out probably 99% of the world's population, causing a complete collapse of civilization - phones stop working, electricity goes off, gas runs out. Survivors flee the cities and form small town settlements for farming and mutual protection.
The narrative moves back and forth between the present, starting about a day before the outbreak starts, when a famous actor has a heart attack during a production of King Lear, and about 25 years in the future, where it follows a caravan of actors/musicians who travel from town to town performing symphonies and Shakespeare plays. The main characters in the book all have some kind of tie to the famous actor, and the pandemic is illustrated by their various perspectives both pre- and post-pandemic (those who survived it anyway).
Very cleverly written, extremely readable, and VERY topical right now, a clear illustration of what might have been much worse if Covid-19 had been a bit more infectious and a bit more deadly, and what could easily still happen another time. Mostly it's a chilling reminder of just how fragile our current lifestyles are, and how easily everything we take for granted could still fall apart completely when the wrong virus comes along. I ended up reading the entire thing in one sitting, it was hard to put down.
