I loved this book! Having already loved Sea of Tranquility, I found Station Eleven equally phenomenal. It’s unreal that this book was written five years before COVID-19 disrupted our lives. So many eerie, true-to-life moments made it hard to believe it wasn’t written post-pandemic. It makes you realize how close we are to complete collapse at any moment, both personally and as a society. The pacing is fantastic, with each chapter ending making me immediately reach for the next. The characters are so clearly detailed that I felt I really understood their motivations. This story is captivating, suspenseful, magnificent, deep, devastating, and yet somehow hopeful. I maintain that in any true survival experience, leave me behind because I don’t have what it takes! Having made it through the last five years, it meant something extra, although I’d love to hear from the perspective of readers before 2020. ( )

I normally have no problem DNFing books that I don't like, but by the time I started really disliking this book, I was almost done so I decided to stick with it which was a waste of time. The main issues that made this one suck are:

1. The post apocalyptic world building suck. Society collapsed only twenty years ago yet no one remembers countries? The Georgian Flu didn't evolve to take out the rest of humanity or spread to animals? The collapse seemed to happen within a month or two which also makes no sense. I could go on.
2. All characters are flat as cardboard. No one is developed in any meaningful way. Arthur is just a normal guy who kinda dislikes fame but also not that much and is a cheater who likes young vulnerable women but also a hero who saved Miranda from an abuser. Kiersten is a nothing character. It irritated me that readers are supposed to care about these pointless people.
3. Mediocre at best writing. Many cringy scenes that I think are supposed to show "MODERN SOCIETY BAD" that fall flat.

Overall very mid ( )

From my blog, at https://clsiewert.wordpress.com/2015/04/12/station-eleven-by-emily-st-john-mande... where I can award half-stars.

“One of the great scientific questions of Galileo’s time was whether the Milky Way was made up of individual stars. Impossible to imagine this ever having been in question in the age of electricity, but the night sky was a wash of light in Galileo’s age, and it was a wash of light now. The era of light pollution had come to an end. The increasing brilliance meant the grid was falling, darkness pooling over the earth. I was here for the end of electricity.“

Full of beautiful language and vivid imagery, Station Eleven is a Shakespeare play in novel form. Like a theater performance, it is a bit self-conscious, a bit dramatic; it comes complete with character soliloquies and a complicated chain of coincidences woven together at the end. Mind you, that isn’t a negative criticism: I trek out to American Players Theater for a Shakespeare play under the stars every summer. There’s just many moments where the story seems staged, a carefully selected tableau of character and action. I liked Station Eleven a great deal, finishing it in two sittings (that the time reading was weeks apart in no way reflects on the book. It was from my desire to give full attention to the story and an obligation to read fifteen chapters of Community/Public Health Nursing).

The story begins with a performance of King Lear. Lead actor Arthur collapses on stage and a member of the audience, Jeevan, fruitlessly attempts CPR while the cast looks on. The narrative begins to hint that things are about to change for everyone, commenting as the cast processes Arthur’s tragedy that in three weeks the majority of them will be dead.

“The snow was falling faster now. He felt extravagantly, guiltily alive. The unfairness of it, his heart pumping faultlessly while somewhere Arthur lay cold and still.“

Narration shifts from Arthur’s death scene to Jeevan walking home and then on to Arthur’s now-ex-wife Miranda. From there, it will leap forward to the future, twenty years after the ‘Georgia flu’ has decimated the world’s population. In the future, we largely follow Kirsten, a member of The Traveling Symphony, a theater and orchestra troupe. The story continues moving gently between Arthur’s past and Kirsten’s present, occasionally dipping into the moments around the influenza outbreak and the struggle afterwards.

“and this collection of petty jealousies, neuroses, undiagnosed PTSD cases, and simmering resentments lived together, traveled together, rehearsed together, performed together 365 days of the year, permanent company, permanent tour. But what made it bearable were the friendships, of course, the camaraderie and the music and the Shakespeare, the moments of transcendent beauty and joy”

One of the motifs of the book is the grief survivors have over loss of industrialized society. There’s a curious parallel embedded within the story, through a graphic novel Miranda is creating, called “Station Eleven.” Interestingly, although St. John Mandel is not planning a sequel to the book, she is writing the text for a Station Eleven comic (author Q&A).

“On silent afternoons in his brother’s apartment, Jeevan found himself thinking about how human the city is, how human everything is. We bemoaned the impersonality of the modern world, but that was a lie, it seemed to him; it had never been impersonal at all. There had always been a massive delicate infrastructure of people, all of them working unnoticed around us, and when people stop going to work, the entire operation grinds to a halt.”

For me, the characters and plotting that rested on Arthur’s social network felt more than a bit constructed. Quite possibly, the elaborate links weren’t worth the payoff. Possibly, they were, again lending the story a Shakespeare-like feel. Hard to decide, but I revised my opinion of St. John Mandel’s writing upwards when I learned additional scenes surrounding Jeevan were included at the request of the editor/publisher (see Q&A link).

I’m also not sure how I feel about the mix of character viewpoints and how they move through time. In some cases the result was interesting; a series of beautifully written character studies. In other cases, I was conscious of feeling “this is going to lead to something” instead of an intrinsic interest in the scene. To further compound the pacing issue, after a long, languorous build is a very rapid denouement and conclusion. The result feels a little less than satisfying.

Overall, though, it is a lovely book, filled with beautiful language, vivid scenes and insightful social commentary. And as a bonus for those who prefer not to dabble in the apocalypse genre, it presents a more hopeful version of a world post devastation. ( )

"This world is an ocean of darkness.
We are the light moving over the surface of the waters,
over the darkness of the undersea.
We long only to go home
We dream of sunlight,
we dream of of walking on earth.
We have been lost for so long
We long only for the world we were born into."

This was a wonderful dystopian/post apocalyptic story. Told in two parts - the world before and after. The before is told through flashbacks, as it shows you where the cast of characters were at the moment it all began to break down. But then it gets back to the after and shows you how they are surviving (or not) and how the world is 10 - 15 years after the event.

But this isn't a story about food gathering and seeking shelter, about bunkers or hoarding. It's not much about brutal survival but much more about the connections we make with people in today's world (internet, email, social media) and how we do in the post world - the after world. But it's also about the small string, the one so long and so small, that connects us all through chance and happenstance. It's an amazing story, one that caught my attention from the first chapter and held me until the end. I'm so glad I gave this one a shot. ( )

There are just so many elements which I found intriguing in this book. I must say the author wove characters and elements of the story together in a masterful manner. ( )