Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel
(Format used for this read: Print–paperback)
Before we moved from the Midwest to Florida earlier this summer, one of my beloved Read The Damn Book club ladies–Alicia– gifted me this book.
She warned me that it may be weird timing to read it, BUT also told me it was a FASCINATING book that she could NOT put down.
I finally took a little Outlander book break and decided to give it a looksie.
OMG yall….I agree with her 100 percent that it IS a weird time to read this ( we will get into that in a minute)…but I also agree with her on it being truly fascinating and one you HAVE to keep reading!
Once you read this summary, you’ll see what we mean about the timing…here ya go:
“Kirsten Raymonde will never forget the night Arthur Leander, the famous Hollywood actor, had a heart attack onstage during a production of King Lear. That was also the night when a devastating flu pandemic arrived in the city, and within weeks, civilization as we know it came to an end.
Twenty years later, Kirsten moves between the settlements of the altered world with a small troupe of actors and musicians. They call themselves the Traveling Symphony, and they have dedicated themselves to keeping the remnants of art and humanity alive. But when they arrive in St. Deborah by the Water, they encounter a violent prophet who will threaten the tiny band’s existence. And as the story takes off, moving back and forth in time, and vividly depicting life before and after the pandemic, the strange twist of fate that connects them all will be revealed.”
Do you see right there that it talks about a damn PANDEMIC???? That ENDS CIVILIZATION????
Yeaaahhhh…… THAT piece of this book freaked me the eff out, I can not even lie yall.
Hence what we said about weird timing.
To read about the progression of the pandemic as it happened in the story—people slowly then quickly becoming infected, people hoarding supplies and staying cooped up inside for days/months/years on end, people losing their loved ones, everything familiar and known and comfortable and “important” suddenly vaporized and gone—it hit WAY too close to home.
Especially because as I was reading, the Delta variant of COVID-19 was beginning to surge across the nation and COVID cases were rising rapidly again.
I kept thinking “Oh my god…what if THIS is the next step for us? What if what is happening in these pages is in our future in the upcoming months? COULD this be our future??”
Let me take a second right here to insert a little PSA from me to you….
If you ain’t vaxxed yet, WTH are you doing. It’s free, it’s available and it works. GO GET THE SHOT.
And also, be safe yall. Just pop that mask on (vaxxed or not b/c right now any and all precautions need to be taken) and wash your hands and make good choices that have positive effects on the community at large.
Maybe if enough of us actually DO all this our future will not be as bleak as the one in this book.
Okay…off my soapbox.
Back to book business.
So….like I was saying, the pandemic aspects were WAAAAY relatable.
Weird thing is this book was written way back in 2014 😨
Super eerie to me.
Listen to pieces of the end of Part 1 of the book…these words are from Chapter 6.
“An incomplete list:
No more diving into pools of chlorinated water lit green from below. No more ball games played out under floodlights. No more porch lights with moths fluttering on summer nights. No more trains running under the surface of cities on the dazzling power of the electric third rail. No more cities. No more films, except rarely, except with a generator drowning out half the dialogue, and only then for the first little while until the fuel for the generators ran out, because automobile gas goes stale after two or three years.
No more screens shining in half light as people raise their phones above the crowd to take photographs of concert stages. No more concert stages lit by candy colored halogens, no more electronica, punk electric guitars.
No more pharmaceuticals. No more certainty of surviving a scratch on one’s hand, a cut on a finger while chopping vegetables for dinner, a dog bite…”
Haunting, right?!?
Because we can relate to this. We can imagine this. We have gone thru some of this in REAL DANG LIFE.
“Hell is the absence of the people you long for.”
I felt that sentence SO HARD that I read it at least 5 times.
I was feeling quite anxious as I read thru the first part of the book…but I think that is how the reader is SUPPOSED to feel. That was the aim of the author…to make you feel uneasy and on edge just like the characters in the story felt in the world.
Unsettled would be the perfect adjective to describe the feeling I experienced while reading…..reminds me of how I felt while reading “Leave The World Behind”! (Another tremendous read BTW)
Even though there were those uncomfortable emotions while reading, this book is a tremendous story about humanity and all of our wonderful and terrible attributes and shortcomings.
Such a deep dive into what makes the human race amazing and tenacious and yet also awful and destructive.
“A deer crossed the road ahead and paused to look at them before it vanished into the trees. The beauty of this world where almost everyone was gone. If hell is other people, what is a world with almost no people in it? Perhaps soon humanity would simply flicker out, but Kirsten found this thought more peaceful than sad. So many species had appeared and later vanished from this earth; what was one more? How many people were even left now?”
I truly adored the Traveling Symphony in the story, whose slogan was a Star Trek quote “Survival is insufficient.”
Because surviving is not enough to sustain your life…to make you feel ALIVE…to make you feel HUMAN….you need things like music, art, theatre, community, interaction, performance, travel, and entertainment to keep your soul thriving within your physical body.
The importance of these things is the driving force behind the purpose of the Symphony and I appreciated this aspect of the story greatly.
What is a life without being able to experience by embodiment or witness the beauty of imagination, creativity, song and movement?
This book was SO SO SO friggin’ well written. The story was heartbreakingly and elegantly captivating in a plethora of ways.
I loved it and Alicia was right….once I started reading it, I could not stop myself from continuing.
She told me she couldn’t stop thinking about it once she finished and again, I have to agree with her.
This is one of those books that will stick with you and linger around your thoughts for a good while after you complete the last chapter.