This is going to be a difficult review as I read this book on my iReader over four months. Maybe three. I can't even remember. Our summer was busy so I pulled what I call "The Goldfinch Read" as when I had read that book over Christmas chunks of the beginning were tucked far away in my overused brain to remember when I picked it up again later in the new year. I did the same with this book so I had to go back and re-read the beginning again to write this.
Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel, did stick to my ribs. I love her writing, the plot is a ten plus and the characters were beyond any great expectations of a reader. Setting is extraordinary and very creative.
I loved this book.
It was a quiet story about a virus that wipes out most of the world's civilization (stay with me here I know you heard that line before) but pockets of people are alive and we only care and focus on a small number of characters on their journey through two decades.
And you feel the isolation as much as the characters do.
I am serious, you feel alone when you read it. It didn't matter if I was in a crowd or not I could feel the expanse of everything decaying throughout the story all by itself.
A famed actor named Arthur Leander plays King Lear on stage one snowy night. He is performing around King Lear's three young daughters during a scene where things deteriorate rapidly. The reader spends the rest of the book with one of the child actors, Kirstin, as well as the man, Jeevan, who was also attending the play that same night the Georgian Flu becomes an international crisis.
It isn't tough, or grimy or zombie rumble tumble, although, you do have some feral as well as cult-like individuals showing up. It's mostly reflective of Arthur's past circle of people intertwining with the present people during the next two decades up to post Georgia Flu Year Twenty. Nostalgia seems to be the cornerstone of the story. As Kirsten and The Shakespearean Company walks many miles looking for people or towns to perform for, the reader goes back and forth from present to past and back again, we learn more and more about the characters and how this new world impacts them, I wanted more but it was enough. It was a perfect read.
This is why I loved the writing:
~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. No one delivers fuel to the gas stations or the airports. Cars are stranded. Airplanes cannot fly. Trucks remain at their points of origin. Food never reaches the cities; grocery stores close. Businesses are locked and then looted. No one comes to work at the power plants or the substations, no one removes fallen trees from electrical lines. Jeevan was standing by the window when the lights went out.
There was a stupid moment or two when he stood near the front door, flipping the light switches. On/off, on/off.~ from Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
I don't want to spoil any of this for you, it's a book to be read not over three to four months but over a short amount of time so you can savor every morsel of it.
I hope Station Eleven will be a movie someday it would be perfect.
Buy it
