Station Eleven

A couple of weeks ago I found myself in the largest independent bookstore in the world (in Portland, Oregon) and despite the weight limit on my already pretty full suitcase, I was determined not to leave without buying a book. I had a list of books that I maybe somewhat wanted, and as I walked past the shelves stuffed with books, I managed to locate all of them. This was surprising in itself, since a couple of weeks earlier a bookstore in London (England) managed to contain exactly zero of the books on the list.

So which to choose, with so much to choose from? 

I will not bore you with my entire thought process, but in the end I walked out with Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel (which actually took the longest to locate, as her name gives you so many options to place it). In the beginning of the pandemic, Station Eleven became a small hit because of its supposed prophetic qualities: we witness a global pandemic that quickly wipes out more than 99% of the world's human population. The novel describes the inevitable steps of food hoarding, the flickering out of the Internet, the beginnings of violence, until not much of civilisation is left

Luckily for us, covid proved to be less fatal than the fictional virus in the novel.

Also luckily for us, the pandemic brought to the limelight this beautifully crafted story, with its clever jumps in time, its well-crafted characters, its philosophical musings and its overarching plot that in the end combines all the threads of the story, all the lives of the characters, to Station Eleven. It is hard to write anything about the story without giving away major plot points. The character I loved best, Kirsten, finds herself some time after the pandemic travelling the world with the Travelling Symphony. They perform Shakespeare and musical pieces to the newly developing hamlets under the motto 'Survival is insufficient'. Just that image, of art being created in a world that is almost devoid of anything that we would call civilisation, is so beautiful. They are haunted by a Prophet and his gang, who proclaim to know the real truth about the pandemic and its cause, another chilling reflection of forces at work during the pandemic's worst times.

I loved every part of this novel, even when things turned very dark. It was one of those books which I wanted to finish to find out how everything connected, but didn't want to be over at the same time. Only the very best books bring this dual longing.

Luckily, I bought The Glass Hotel at the same time. And there are many more to read, including the just published Sea of Tranquility. 

I read somewhere that St. John Mandel is creating an interconnected universe in her novels, with similar characters appearing in different novels. I can't wait to find out how all of her novels are part of this greater world, and how many pieces we can puzzle together while reading.