Station Eleven
Station Eleven was published in 2014, so I’m wondering what all the pre-2020 readers thought of this, Emily St. John Mandel’s “pandemic novel.” I can’t stop thinking about it. Not just because of the mentions of contagion, incubation periods, symptoms, and quarantine that are all so eerily familiar. Those phrases will resonate with a post-2020 reader in a different, more concrete way.
Specifically, I read Station Eleven between the last quarter of 2021 and now. (Sorry, Erica, for having your book for so long!) We are at a different point in this pandemic, one that we have realized is not a neat and tidy ending like we presumed a vaccine would usher in nearly a year ago. That can feel hard and weighty sometimes because humans like certainty and defined parameters.
Station Eleven is everything that The Glass Hotel, Mandel’s latest novel, is: eerie, disconcerting, slightly ethereal. (These are the only two of her novels I’ve read, but I’m 2 for 2 on the “wow” scale, so I’ll be checking out her earlier work for sure.) But the ending — which of course is a page-turning crescendo — is chilling. In a beautiful way. Here’s what Mandel had to say in the New York Times last week on the occasion of HBO’s adaptation of Station Eleven:
“There’s something in the idea that you can lose an entire world, [that] all of society that you take for granted every day can disappear in the course of a pandemic. But there is life afterward, and there’s joy afterward, and a lot of things are worth living for in the aftermath.”
What will “joy afterward” look like for you?
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