Station Eleven was a book I had been hearing about long before it arrived in print, and once it hit the shelves, I kept hearing more and more people raving about it. I held off on buying it because I was busy with my own writing projects and had other books stacking up, so when it arrived as one of the four books in the Best of 2014 Book Riot box, I was very excited I didn’t already have a copy. It was worth the wait!
Title: Station Eleven
Author: Emily St. John Mandel
Year: 2014
Genre: Fiction
Setting: Toronto and northern parts of the U.S.
Characters: Arthur (actor), Jeevan (paparazzi/EMT), Kirsten (Traveling Symphony actress), Clark (Arthur’s long-time friend), Miranda (Arthur’s wife #1, artist), Elizabeth (wife #2), Tyler (Arthur & Elizabeth’s son)
Plot: Arthur is in his 50s, acting as King Lear when he dies of a heart attack on stage. Jeevan, a member of the audience, tries to resuscitate him, but it’s too late. A little eight-year-old girl, Kirsten, looks on in confusion until Jeevan leads her away. Later that night, Jeevan learns from a friend that an epidemic is spreading. He heads up to his brother’s apartment with seven shopping carts of supplies. Days later, 99% of the world’s population is gone. Years pass, and people settle as they can, but one group chooses to make beauty as they can, the Traveling Symphony, through playing orchestra music and acting out Shakespeare. Kristen, now in her twenties, is one of their members. The story moves across chapters of different characters’ lives, drawing the connections between them until we find out how Kirsten came to possess two copies of a rare comic, Station Eleven, and how art can be the medium that strangely connects us all together, even in trauma and tragedy.
Verdict: Of course a supervirus is going to take us all out. Anyone could write that. And maybe even some could predict that people would band together and hold on to art by performing music and theater. But Mandel makes the story more special by bringing in such a broad cast of characters and motivations and tying them together through a graphic novel and the dysfunction of celebrity lifestyles. I’d recommend this book to just about anyone, and I don’t really believe in 10/10, so I’ll go with a 9.7/10–solid high A.
Joy Reads 