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A review by savaging
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
4.0
Death all over, and we're left with the New Testament, an unpublished comic book, William Shakespeare, old tabloids, a remembered episode of Star Trek Voyager. Listen: books are ghosts. This means we can speak to each other, even across time and catastrophe, but only in unpredictable hauntings.
Human nature is never idealized in this book, but all the same there is a believable beauty. After the plague, after the killings, people will eventually form a traveling symphony and Shakespeare troupe. I think that makes this a feminist work. Give us bread and give us roses.
I sometimes thought it was maybe the place and the plot that I loved, and the characters would have bored me if they weren't thrown up against catastrophe. But then, I like deranged characters best, and may have lost my appreciation for the merely-normal.
Human nature is never idealized in this book, but all the same there is a believable beauty. After the plague, after the killings, people will eventually form a traveling symphony and Shakespeare troupe. I think that makes this a feminist work. Give us bread and give us roses.
I sometimes thought it was maybe the place and the plot that I loved, and the characters would have bored me if they weren't thrown up against catastrophe. But then, I like deranged characters best, and may have lost my appreciation for the merely-normal.