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Station Eleven

Emily St. John Mandel

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What Members Thought

Apr 07, 2017 Gill rated it really liked it

4.5 stars

This book is very different from those I usually read. It's a credit to the standard of the writing, that I found the plot and characters completely convincing.

I especially liked the roles of drama and music in the novel.

I'm glad I've read this, and will look out for other books by Emily St. John Mandel. ...more

22 likes · Like · see review

Dec 15, 2014 Viv JM rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: favourites, science-fiction, audio, author-female, read-in-2016

This is a wonderful book. It is a beautifully written depiction of a world before and after a deadly flu virus wipes out 99% of the population. Although there are bleak scenes (as you would expect) I have come away from this feeling uplifted and appreciative and really quite emotionally moved.

20 likes · Like · see review

Feb 07, 2016 El rated it really liked it

Shelves: peer-pressure, library-borrow, 21st-centurylit, society-went-boom

I wasn't planning on reading this book... probably ever, really. Just because everyone is all like "I love this book!" and "It's amazeballs!" and usually when people rave for two years about a book like that, I'm seriously disappointed when I get around to it. I figured this would be no exception.

But then I found out that Emily St. John Mandel is coming to Pittsburgh next week, and tickets aren't all that expensive. I figured it might be nice to listen to her talk for a bit, but didn't want to g I wasn't planning on reading this book... probably ever, really. Just because everyone is all like "I love this book!" and "It's amazeballs!" and usually when people rave for two years about a book like that, I'm seriously disappointed when I get around to it. I figured this would be no exception.

But then I found out that Emily St. John Mandel is coming to Pittsburgh next week, and tickets aren't all that expensive. I figured it might be nice to listen to her talk for a bit, but didn't want to go in as a Mandel virgin because even $15 is too much for me to spend on someone I might not even like.

I got the book from the library, thinking it would take me a week to read it. But I breezed through it.

It's not a complicated read. The story moves along at a pretty nice clip, and it held my interest all the way through, though occasionally I felt Mandel took things a tad too far just in the sense of her scene-building.

The story is getting to be pretty well known around literary circles these days (and there's talk of a movie eventually, so expect to hear more about it, bookworms!), so I'll keep that brief. The largest detail is that the world is forever changed by what is known as the "Georgia flu", a plague that wipes out a great many people, leaving the world pretty much destroyed.

What makes this an interesting story about a dystopian civilization that is somewhat different than the others is that it doesn't just focus on the plague itself, or the aftermath. This story jumps around through time, but not in an annoying way that I actually despised in books like Cloud Atlas. Here it was done with some skill and a nice sense of detail that I think sets Mandel apart. (Says I, having only read one of her books.)

I know there are complaints about the flu itself, and this and that other thing about the way the civilization wound up, and I won't deny there's not room for some questions. There's always room for those sorts of questions. I don't feel that was necessarily the focus of Mandel's book, but it didn't (for me, anyway) distract from the story. And I am usually highly distracted by things like that when I read. I can be really fucking nit-picky.

What I especially appreciated about this book is that Mandel managed to make me, as the reader, think about my own life. It made me think about all the things and people I have taken for granted, not out of any malicious reasoning, but just because I'm so used to seeing them and I'm not sure how I would feel if they just weren't there tomorrow or ever again. The technologies I've grown accustomed to, even though I am fairly Amish compared to a lot of my peers - I like my old phone and the fact that our TV looks like a computer screen because we've never thought it important enough to buy a big-screen TV; but what we do have works for us and I'm not sure how my life would be if all of a sudden that world I've known and built is completely destroyed.

It's not a perfect novel, but it was a lot of fun to read. ...more

19 likes · Like · see review

Jun 28, 2020 Camelia Rose rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: science-fiction, dystopia

A deadly pandemic (a swine flu) wiped out 99% of world population. The world descends into chaos, and the survivors only gradually stop killing each other when ammunitions run out.

The book is dark but not as bleak as I'd have feared, for I am in no mood for a hopeless novel. Humanity is at its lowest point but never completed destroyed and it rebounds. It's thoughtful and well-crafted.

The best part of the book is the characters' unbearable longing for the dead world. It reads like an ode to our A deadly pandemic (a swine flu) wiped out 99% of world population. The world descends into chaos, and the survivors only gradually stop killing each other when ammunitions run out.

The book is dark but not as bleak as I'd have feared, for I am in no mood for a hopeless novel. Humanity is at its lowest point but never completed destroyed and it rebounds. It's thoughtful and well-crafted.

The best part of the book is the characters' unbearable longing for the dead world. It reads like an ode to our world.

"sometimes when she looked at her collection of pictures she tried to imagine and place herself in that other, shadow life. You walk into a room and flip a switch and the room fills with light. You leave your garbage in bags on the curb, and a truck comes and transports it to some invisible place. When you’re in danger, you call for the police. Hot water pours from faucets. Lift a receiver or press a button on a telephone, and you can speak to anyone. All of the information in the world is on the Internet, and the Internet is all around you, drifting through the air like pollen on a summer breeze. There is money, slips of paper that can be traded for anything: houses, boats, perfect teeth. There are dentists. She tried to imagine this life playing out somewhere at the present moment. Some parallel Kirsten in an air-conditioned room, waking from an unsettling dream of walking through an empty landscape. "

"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 surfaces of cities on the dazzling power of the electric third rail. No more cities ... 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. No more flight. No more towns glimpsed from the sky through airplane windows, points of glimmering light; no more looking down from thirty thousand feet and imagining the lives lit up by those lives at that moment ... No more countries, all borders unmanned. No more fire departments, no more police. No more road maintenance or garbage pickup ... No more Internet. No more social media, no more scrolling through litanies of dreams and nervous hopes and photographs of lunches, cries for help and expressions of contentment and relationship-status updates with heart icons whole or broken, plans to meet up later, pleas, complaints, desires, pictures of babies dressed as bears or peppers for Halloween. No more reading and commenting on the lives of others, and in so doing, feeling slightly less alone in the room. No more avatars."

Of course, there has to be a religious cult at the end of the world, because they are always there, like today. “That kind of insanity’s contagious,” Dolores had said, echoing his thoughts.

However, the geek inside me says the flu described in the book could not possibly kill 99% world population in several weeks. According to the author, its incubation period is very short (several hours) and it's very deadly (100% mortality rate), the two measures combined (a patient dies too fast to have infected too many people, even with an airborne pathogen) indicates the R0 value would't be high enough to destroy 99% world population in a very short period. Here is an article on how R0 is calculated: https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/25/... ...more

14 likes · Like · see review

Oct 01, 2015 Irene rated it it was ok

A virulent flu strain decimates the earth’s population leaving isolated pockets of survivors. Several story lines and time periods are woven together: the cast of a Toronto production of Shakespeare at the time of the pandemic, the lives of several people connected to the star of that cast decades prior to the outbreak and a traveling Shakespearean troop twenty years after the collapse of civilization. I found the jumping between story lines disjointed and confusing. I suspect the point was to c ...more

4 likes · Like · see review

Aug 12, 2015 Sera rated it really liked it

Shelves: own, science-fiction, other-fiction, kindle

I had been torn in whether to read this book because it seemed to polarize opinions among my GR friends. I can say now that I am glad that I decided to read it since I am definitely in the "really enjoyed it" club here.

The book goes back and forth in time between a pre- and post-apocalyptic world. It focuses on a few characters, some who survived the apocalypse, and some who didn't. What I enjoyed most about the book was that there were no zombies, but that not everyone who had survived was a go ...more

3 likes · Like · see review

Oct 01, 2014 Karen Michele Burns rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: my-5-star-books

Because this was a book with a lot of buzz, I didn’t read a lot about it before reading it. I expected to enjoy it, because I have remained a fan of dystopian stories despite the large number of YA dystopia I have read as a just retired high school librarian. I had to wait out a long list of holds at the library and sometimes my enthusiasm for a book wanes during that process, but it came in at a good time and I was still eager to get under its covers. When I actually began reading, though, I wa ...more

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Jan 14, 2015 Janice (JG) rated it really liked it

A feeling of Cloud Atlas stirred with a little bit of McCarthy's The Road... add a dash of The Stand and set it all to a Bob Dylan soundtrack of lost love, broken dreams, and country roads, and you might get the sense of Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven. It stretches the edges of apocalyptic/dystopian genre storytelling like a rubber band. The writing is excellent. It feels real -- like maybe this really is how people would behave at the end, and how they might wind up in a new beginning. ...more

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Jul 26, 2015 Pamela rated it really liked it · review of another edition

As Shakespearean actor Arthur Leander collapses and dies on stage, a deadly epidemic is starting to sweep across the whole world, wiping out 99% of humanity. 20 years later, former child actress Kirsten (who witnessed Arthur's death) is part of the Traveling Symphony - as their name suggests, they travel around the Great Lakes area, bringing music and Shakespeare to the few remaining communities of survivors. At one of these communities, their path crosses that of the sinister Prophet, and event ...more

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Jun 29, 2015 Dawn rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: can-lit, science-fiction

Hard to decide what to write or how to rate this one. I liked it in a 'it was pretty good but I don't think I'd recommend it' way.
The characters weren't really interesting, not enough to have me wondering what would happen to them or wonder how they got there. Seeing as that really is the whole story, it contributed to my lackluster response to it.
Still, it is a good book. It's well written and the dystopian aspects are eminently possible, which is always good. ...more

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Sep 12, 2020 Wendy rated it liked it

Shelves: audiobooks, dystopian, science-fiction, pen-faulkner, 2020

This was a really interesting dystopian set-up, and I assumed I was gathering all these disparate threads, gradually figuring out where they (somewhat conveniently) overlapped in order to follow them toward some kind of presumed payoff, but my reaction at the end was "wait, is that it?" ...more

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Jul 11, 2015 Kathy Chumley rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: book-club

Seven word review: A 21st century version of The Stand.

Slightly longer review: Station Eleven is not The Stand. I would like to give this more stars because it seems like everyone loved this book. It was a quick read and I did have a hard time putting it down. On the other hand, I felt there were a lot of unanswered questions, too many loose threads, a rather abrupt ending, and the frequent jarring use of present tense that seemed to show up randomly. There are too many characters and none of th ...more

1 like · Like · see review

Jan 03, 2015 Meghan rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: own, sci-fi, dmbc, book-club, american, audiobook, audio-book, recommended

This was a slow starter for me. The narrator was fine. The story was fine. Everything was fine. But it wasn't exciting or attention grabbing. It was just your ordinary post-apocalyptic dystopia story. But then somewhere in the middle I got a little attached to Miranda and everything changed. And I felt invested in the story and got quite into it.

But this is not something I would recommend to people. It's a decent book club pick because there are good topics to discuss. But writing-wise, this is This was a slow starter for me. The narrator was fine. The story was fine. Everything was fine. But it wasn't exciting or attention grabbing. It was just your ordinary post-apocalyptic dystopia story. But then somewhere in the middle I got a little attached to Miranda and everything changed. And I felt invested in the story and got quite into it.

But this is not something I would recommend to people. It's a decent book club pick because there are good topics to discuss. But writing-wise, this is not my favorite genre nor is it the best example. It had at many times made me think of The Road by Cormac McCarthy. And while this is not as bleak, I found his book much better written.

Lastly, I recently read The Sparrow, which I loved. Some other friends were really irritated by the science (or lack thereof), which I hadn't noticed. I get where they were coming from now. In a similar vein, I was really irritated by the setting of this story. Being from Michigan, I never once felt I was actually IN Michigan. And I felt the entire scenario (that people would pick Shakespeare over contemporary plays) unlikely, particularly in the upper-Lower Peninsula/UP. (This is not a elitest viewpoint--I'm sure there would be many people who would enjoy it--simply these are the people that made Escanaba in the Moonlight "famous" and would they really pick old English over something more familiar and comforting?) And while I understood that flights were diverted by the disaster, MOST people living in these areas would still be FROM this area.

Michigan is an agricultural/hunting state. And while many people from the larger cities would need to learn how to go back to their hunting and gathering roots, I do not believe it would have been as difficult for them as this story made it out. I mean, for the love, we are surrounded by 4 of the 5 biggest fresh water lakes, with multiple lakes and rivers within our boundaries. Fishing, game, and farming would be plentiful. And yes, you can farm without electricity (it's called a hoe).

Also, how do these people travel in the winter? The winters lately have been so cold the waves in the UP lakes (you know, where the Mackinac Bridge is located) are frozen. You need proper shelter and heat (so not a tent). So then how so they cart all their winter stuff with them in the summer with no gas-powered engines? Do you know how much room a snowsuit takes up? And boots? And hats and mittens and scarves? (Did the author not read Little House on the Prarie? I feel she would have greatly benefited from getting some history of how farming people lived without electricity.)

And then, 20 years is a long time to figure things out but not long enough to forget everything. And while we rely on the internet today, did all the libraries burn down? I doubt many sick people went to die in the public libraries. So did everyone forget how to look stuff up? Also, I am currently reading the Foundation series which is about the decline of civilization. In it, the decline hit different populations in different ways based on proximity to the central government and the make-up of the local population. And while I agree if 3/4 of the population was wiped out we would be set back decades, I had a hard time believing we would be set back centuries. I suppose it would depend on who survived but if you're intellectually sufficient to appreciate Shakespeare, I feel you would have the wherewithal to figure out how to learn how to get back to life. (view spoiler)

So yes, I had a few major problems with the story that just needled me. But once I got past it (and it was difficult for me), I could appreciate it for what it was. It felt a bit older YA which may be why I was a bit irritated with the storytelling.

But overall, I am glad I read it. I'd have liked to have had pictures of the comic book art but the story itself did not interest me in the least, which also made me feel that was part of the problem.

Side Note: Mackinac is pronounced the same way as Mackinaw. Narrators need to be given a pronunciation guide before recording. It is terrible when you hear "Mack-i-nack" Bridge and then "Mack-i-naw" City. It's nails on a chalkboard, editors. ...more

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Jan 04, 2015 Kai Coates rated it liked it

Underwhelmed, but had potential. I read this book as part of a "genre-bending" task and several reviews mentioned how this book managed to straddle the border between sci-fi and literary fiction to the point that people wondered if genre fiction was even a thing anymore. To which I will say, "That's BS and here's why":

This a competently written book. I believe it easily falls into the more literary fiction "side" of things than sci-fi, but I can see how people who usually only read sci-fi would ...more

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Feb 25, 2015 S.L. Berry rated it it was amazing

Shelves: audiobooks, fantasy-paranormal-magic

Imagine the world as you know it, whether as techno-commercialist, an antiquarian yesteryear, a back to the earth environmentalist, or simply as a bookworm visiting a relative in a hospital curled up in a waiting room with a good book and without warning everyone around you turns into a heaving sickly mass of cells. Then imagine that you are one of the few that survive, you don’t get sick. It is this world that Emily St. John Mandel writes about in Station Eleven. A particularly virulent of the Imagine the world as you know it, whether as techno-commercialist, an antiquarian yesteryear, a back to the earth environmentalist, or simply as a bookworm visiting a relative in a hospital curled up in a waiting room with a good book and without warning everyone around you turns into a heaving sickly mass of cells. Then imagine that you are one of the few that survive, you don’t get sick. It is this world that Emily St. John Mandel writes about in Station Eleven. A particularly virulent of the swine flu emanating from the Republic of Georgia in the former USSR unleashes itself among the world, killing most within a short period — days; the incubation period is three to four hours. This is not a terrorist plot; it is more akin to the bygone days of plague run amuck. The world shuts down, for there is no one left to fly planes, staff hospitals, run restaurants, operate television and radio stations, manufacture and sell medicine, batteries and other essentials as well as luxury items. The internet and social media collapses. What’s left? Music, Shakespeare, and humanity returned to its most basic level. With these three things–the world can begin again, and it does as small bands of people return to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle with an intermingling of small “family” farms.

A traveling symphony, bass clefthe remnants of a troupe of actors and symphony with the occasional person joining along the way, travel from Toronto to Michigan and other parts putting on Shakespeare plays and classical concerts. In a nearby town, a group of survivors band together and restart life in an abandoned airport. In Virginia, yet another band of survivors are making their live over. A man calling himself The Prophet quotes Revelation, forms a polygamous cult and claims the pandemic was God’s punishment and that he is the messenger/enforcer. All of the characters have some connection to a production of King Lear that abruptly ends when the actor playing King Lear dies on stage from an apparent heart attack, though his symptoms earlier in the day point to a contagion that has already begun its insidious attack.

Unlike most novels, there is no rough beginning, and Mandel’s use of language is near flawless. Only two quirks which were troublesome to this reader. Both centered around the character, the paramedic in training who tries to save the actor in the King Lear production. Because of the passage of time, or chapters, depending on how you look at it, a reader can get him confused with some of the traveling symphony. He is, and is not, a central character though he represented to this reader an example of the instability of this world. Arthur who portrayed King Lear and the Prophet were more extreme examples representing the dangerous elements of instability. The other quirk which was never explained was how the paramedic got to Virginia, assuming where Virginia and Toronto are where they are now and the given that travel afar was taking your life in your hands, not for the hardy soul as there was no form of motorized transport in the early days of this new brave world.earth

There are the humorous aspects of the narrative–the Museum of Civilization in a room made out to resemble a Sky Club room with the ipods, ipads, smart phones lined up on display beside the Amex credit card, driver’s licenses, stiletto heels, a motorcycle, automobile parts, and other things from the world before. Then there is the discussion between a former CEO and the museum’s curator/founder about the oddness and cliche nature of the English language — “shooting” an email for example.

Station Eleven ends with the world beginning anew as it must if there is music, literature, and humanity around. Read Station Eleven in this world or the next. ...more

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