Book Review: Station Eleven

by Emily St. John Mandel
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

First off, I have to say this is not a book I would have EVER picked up solely based on the cover and the snippet about it on the back cover. Dystopian fiction is really hit and miss for me, and I generally don't like pop culture or following the lives of celebrities; so I would have picked this up, read the back, and put it back down without a second thought.

But then I saw a review of it by Julie Bogart, who authors the language arts curriculum that I use with my kids, and she highly recommended it. So highly in fact, that she even chose it as one of the books to be read this year by the older students in her LA curriculum. I have enjoyed about 90% of the books she's recommended for younger kids, and I admire her a lot....so I knew I had to read Station Eleven simply because she said to, even though every logical particle in my brain was screaming at me that this really wasn't the kind of book for me.

And guess what? I loved it. Like LOVED IT loved it. Haha! It's so awesome when that happens.

Station Eleven is different from any book I've ever read before, which was super refreshing. The only way I can think to describe it is like a mash-up of La la Land and a not quite so gruesome version of The Road with a tiny bit of the ending of Fahrenheit 451 sprinkled on top. It's the most beautifully well written apocalypse story I've ever read.

Station Eleven is a story about people. Ok, it's also about the end of the world and the beginning of a new one, but that's just the backdrop. The story is really about people, and how they weave in and out of each other's lives, and what a person's presence as well as their absence means to someone else. Maybe that's why it reminds me of La La Land. Also the whole Hollywood thing.

I loved the characters. I loved the jumping back and forth between Before and After. The author's voice was perfect. And I especially loved that nothing was "overdone". It wasn't melodramatic, the events and feelings weren't exaggerated or sensationalized. They were understated, if anything, and what was left unsaid was powerful.

This book would make for a fantastic book club discussion.

Quotes from the book:

“Hell is the absence of the people you long for.”

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“Survival is insufficient.”

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“It was gorgeous and claustrophobic. I loved it and I always wanted to escape.”

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“The house is silent now and she feels like a stranger here. “This life was never ours,” she whispers to the dog, who has been following her from room to room, and Luli wags her tail and stares at Miranda with wet brown eyes. “We were only ever borrowing it.”

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“What I mean to say is, the more you remember, the more you’ve lost.”

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“The thing with the new world,” the tuba had said once, “is it’s just horrifically short on elegance.”

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“But anyway, I look around sometimes and I think - this will maybe sound weird - it's like the corporate world's full of ghosts. And actually, let me revise that, my parents are in academia so I've had front row seats for that horror show, I know academia's no different, so maybe a fairer way of putting this would be to say that adulthood's full of ghosts."

"I'm sorry, I'm not sure I quite --"

"I'm talking about these people who've ended up in one life instead of another and they are just so disappointed. Do you know what I mean? They've done what's expected of them. They want to do something different but it's impossible now, there's a mortgage, kids, whatever, they're trapped. Dan's like that."

"You don't think he likes his job, then."

"Correct," she said, "but I don't think he even realises it. You probably encounter people like him all the time. High-functioning sleepwalkers, essentially.”

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“He found he was a man who repented almost everything, regrets crowding in around him like moths to a light. This was actually the main difference between twenty-one and fifty-one, he decided, the sheer volume of regret.”

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“No one had any idea, it turned out. None of the older Symphony members knew much about science, which was frankly maddening given how much time these people had had to look things up on the Internet before the world ended.”

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“They spend all their lives waiting for their lives to begin.”

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“it is possible to survive this but not unaltered, and you will carry these men with you through all the nights of your life.”

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“standing on a stool on his wondrously functional pre-Libya legs, the bullet that would sever his spinal cord still twenty-five years away but already approaching: a woman giving birth to a child who will someday pull the trigger on a gun, a designer sketching the weapon or its precursor, a dictator making a decision that will spark in the fullness of time into the conflagration that Frank will go overseas to cover for Reuters, the pieces of a pattern drifting closer together.”

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“Cold rain, the sidewalk shining, the shhh of car tires on the wet street. Thinking about the terrible gulf of years between eighteen and fifty.”

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“You can't argue with them, because they live by an entirely different logic.”

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“Everything ends. I am not afraid.”

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“You know where I'm from," he said, and she understood what he meant by this. Once we lived on an island in the ocean. Once we took the ferry to go to high school, and at night the sky was brilliant in the absence of all these city lights. Once we paddled canoes to the lighthouse to look at petroglyphs and fished for salmon and walked through deep forests, but all of this was completely unremarkable because everyone else we knew did these things too, and here in these lives we've built for ourselves, here in these hard and glittering cities, none of this would seem real if it wasn't for you.” 

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“But these thoughts broke apart in his head and were replaced by strange fragments: This is my soul and the world unwinding, this is my heart in the still winter air. Finally whispering the same two words over and over: “Keep walking. Keep walking. Keep walking.”

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“See, that illustrates the whole problem,” Dieter said. “The best Shakespearean actress in the whole territory, and her favourite line of text is from Star Trek.” 

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“Those previous versions of herself were so distant now that remembering them was almost like remembering other people, acquaintances, young women whom she’d known a long time ago, and she felt such compassion for them. “I regret nothing,” she told her reflection in the ladies’ room mirror, and believed it.”

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“The boy turns to his parents and for an instant in the twilight he looks like his namesake, like Jeevan’s brother. He comes to them, the moment already passed, and Jeevan lifts him into his arms to kiss the silk of his hair. Always these memories, barely submerged.”

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“He closed the fridge door, made his last breakfast - scrambled eggs - and showered, dressed, combed his hair, left for the theater an hour early so he'd have time to linger with the newspaper over his second-to-last coffee at his favorite coffee place, all of the small details that comprise a morning, a life.” 

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“But the trouble, is she doesn’t really care. There was a time when this conversation would have reduced her to tears, but now she swivels in her chair to look out at the lake and thinks about moving trucks. She could call in sick to work, pack up her things, and be gone in a few hours. It is sometimes necessary to break everything.”