Book Reco # 12: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
A book not so much about the apocalypse as about life, death, memories, and regrets.
Happy mid-week, everyone!
I reread Station Eleven the other week and am debating with myself now if I should add it to my all-time favorite books list. It's even more beautiful reading it the second time around. I annotated a lot this time, and I think this might be my most personal book yet. I'm sure some of you are pretty familiar with this book already since it became popular during the early days of the pandemic. The novel hit home despite being published in 2014, six years before COVID-19. Station Eleven is not so much about the apocalypse as about living life, yearning for another life, death, memories, and regrets.
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐5/5 stars
Station Eleven takes place in a post-apocalyptic world where most of humanity was wiped out by the "Georgian Flu" pandemic. It's not your typical post-apocalyptic survival book. Don't expect a lot of action scenes. Instead, the author shows us the slices of life before and after the pandemic. It talks about dreaming of the ideal life we want to live but ending up in another. It talks about all the lives we lead and all the lives we meet. Emily St. John Mandel is an author who notices the little things. The things that make up our day, monumental or insignificant, that we otherwise take for granted. It highlights all the small details that comprise a life.
Reading Station Eleven feels like living in someone's daydream. A lot of the writing talks about the character's memories. It's so beautifully written that I feel like I'm in a dream most of the time. I feel like I'm the one remembering. This fluid dream-like narration gives its characters multidimensionality. To understand this dream-like narration I'm talking about, let me leave you with one of my favorite quotes from the book.
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.