A book I have kept thinking of years after reading it. Great prose, plot, characters, universe - it has it all.
My favorite scenes are of Jeevan and Frank in Toronto as the pandemic is unfolding.
Station Eleven is a novel about a pandemic of apocalyptic proportions, but, crucially, it is not about the end of the world so much as it is about the birth of a new one.
It follows several characters through different periods in their lives, from decades before the pandemic, to its early days, to 15 and 20 years after the event. Most of the main characters are creatives with different relationships to their art, and to Arthur Leander, a famous actor who dies onstage during a production of King Lear, on the day that the pandemic reaches North America. His death serves a focal point, and symbolically as the death of the old world that brings forth new life.
Life after the pandemic is difficult and dangerous, especially at the beginning. However, most of the focus is on a period 20 years after the event, when people have mostly settled …
Station Eleven is a novel about a pandemic of apocalyptic proportions, but, crucially, it is not about the end of the world so much as it is about the birth of a new one.
It follows several characters through different periods in their lives, from decades before the pandemic, to its early days, to 15 and 20 years after the event. Most of the main characters are creatives with different relationships to their art, and to Arthur Leander, a famous actor who dies onstage during a production of King Lear, on the day that the pandemic reaches North America. His death serves a focal point, and symbolically as the death of the old world that brings forth new life.
Life after the pandemic is difficult and dangerous, especially at the beginning. However, most of the focus is on a period 20 years after the event, when people have mostly settled down into relatively stable settlements. It follows the Travelling Symphony, a group of actors and musicians who travel the Great Lakes region of North America performing Shakespeare and classical music, and a man who builds a museum of artifacts from the fallen civilisation. It's not about an animalistic, Hobbesian struggle for survival, but the preservation of culture and memory, and communicating what we are into the future, because, as the (borrowed) slogan of the Travelling Symphony puts it, "survival is insufficient".
It's about memory and trauma, loss, isolation and hope, it's in turn haunting and terrifying, but above all, beautiful. Loved it.
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!
There was a lot in this I really enjoyed. Interesting characters and a fascinating set of situations, all very tightly plotted and woven together in a system that slowly became visible throughout the novel. The structure and style of it has a lot of similarities to The Passage - something the book slyly acknowledges at one point.
However, I can only give this four and not five stars because the ending - or, more accurately, the climactic point of the narrative - feels too short and brief, almost perfunctory in the way it happens. When I was getting towards the end, I was thinking that I'd missed something in the blurb and this was just the first book of a pair or a series. There was enough going on and being built up I couldn't see how it could be resolved in that space - and I'm not sure it …
There was a lot in this I really enjoyed. Interesting characters and a fascinating set of situations, all very tightly plotted and woven together in a system that slowly became visible throughout the novel. The structure and style of it has a lot of similarities to The Passage - something the book slyly acknowledges at one point.
However, I can only give this four and not five stars because the ending - or, more accurately, the climactic point of the narrative - feels too short and brief, almost perfunctory in the way it happens. When I was getting towards the end, I was thinking that I'd missed something in the blurb and this was just the first book of a pair or a series. There was enough going on and being built up I couldn't see how it could be resolved in that space - and I'm not sure it was, leaving me a bit empty when it finished.
The plot of this book is not only interesting but one that lets you think. The writing is superb and it is an overall beautiful book.
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.
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.
