Station Eleven Book Review
9/24/15
English
#EN2C

    Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel showed the truth about appreciating life. A compelling novel that I could not put down because every part of that book was in tact with the main theme of appreciating everyday existence. Mendel was a finalist for a NAtional Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award producing the novel, Station Eleven. The book is written in different intervals of time in each chapter. Most of the chapters consisted of a flashback showing how an event previously occurred and how it concluded. The fiercely imaginative novel named Station Eleven was created by a character in the book where she created this comic called by the same title, hence the title of the novel. One of the main characters named Kirsten struggles to stay alive during the time when the world is falling to pieces due to the main confliction, the Georgia Flu. This epidemic that soon turned into a pandemic took the lives of most of the population, causing great distraught in the struggle for survival.

    The Georgia Flu started the night when the star of the play King Lear, Arthur Leander, had a heart attack on stage and died. Kirsten was a very young girl then playing an extra in the play. A man who rushed up to stage who tried to save Arthur was training to be a paramedic. Jeevan, shortly after was told about the plane flying in from another country had a very deadly and contagious disease that was killing some at first. Jeevan was told by his friend who worked in the hospital that the patients who were dealing with the flu, that he immediately needed to leave the city. After Jeevan ignored that request, he went to his brothers house and stayed there for years, with no contact to the outside world because by the view of the city, the world was ending. Twenty years later, Kirsten found herself attached to the Traveling Symphony, a small group of actors and musicians. This troupe planned to keep the music remembrance alive despite the fact that most of the population is infected and dying. They traveled from city to city performing Shakespeare plays and music pieces. As time goes on, flashbacks from the lives of Arthur Leander, his divorced wives, Kirsten, Jeevan, and Clark, Arthur's latest best friend. All of the flashbacks help the reader understand why things happened the way they did as well as the reasons they did. As the Symphony is traveling, they reach a violent prophet who threatens the group he will kill them if they do not give him his designated wife that he spotted out of the band's members. While struggling for survival, Jeevan remembers the pictures he got of Arthur during the time of when he was involved in paparazzi, Kirsten remembers to look for the former members of the band that left a long time ago after the woman got pregnant as well as the sight of Jeevan in the audience at the play, and Miranda, one of Arthur's ex-wives, creates a comic called Station Eleven. There could there be a coincidence between the comic title and the novel title, but that is for the reader the determine.

    "The shock of realizing that this was probably actually the ending, after a lifetime of near misses, after all of this time. She walked forward through the radiant world, the sunlight and shadow and green. Thinking of trying to do something heroic, sending a knife spinning through the air as she fell" Station Eleven (Mendel 300). Towards the end of the novel, Kirsten believes she is on the edge of the ending world. There is no way to turn back time and prevent the pandemic. Kirsten sees that the world is ending as well as her life because at this point in the novel, she is encountered by the prophet who will raise a gun to her head. By having Mendel include this paragraph, the reader will realize that the characters have given up on surviving and realize the end is right around the corner.

    What was so not so great about this book was the fact that the flashbacks went way past time and sometimes it got confusing. The problem with this is that the reader cannot understand the before and after type of situations. Each chapter had a different character's' perspective which made it more difficult to stay with the same point of view. As amusing as it was for me to figure out to who was speaking, it was hard to keep up with the diverse aspects of each voice of the character. However, Station Eleven did had a very unique message and very good set of situations along the storyline, producing an excellent novel.
   
This novel represented the true meaning life has and how grateful we are to have a world put together. Our world is not falling apart, making us appreciate what it brings to the table. The novel was very fascinating, and it does what most books hope to do, is keep the reader active.