2020 Reprint of the 1922 Edition. "An American journalist and revolutionary writer, John Reed became …
The writing style in this book is frantic, as if it's just the author's notes sent straight to press, but it captures the nature and energy of the events. It's quite hard to follow what exactly is happening, with the myriad characters, parties, committees, papers and so on, but it is engaging so far.
Over a hundred and fifty years after its initial publication, Emily Brontë’s turbulent portrayal of …
The story of Ellen Dean, a woman born into servitude, who helps to raise two generations of spoiled, petulant brats for a series of masters on the Yorkshire estates of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange.
From driverless cars to smart thermostats, from autonomous stock-trading systems to drones equipped with their own behavioral algorithms, the Internet …
Station Eleven is a 2014 novel by Emily St. John Mandel, her fourth. It takes …
Survival is insufficient
5 stars
Station Eleven is a novel about a pandemic of apocalyptic proportions, but, crucially, it is not about the end of the world so much as it is about the birth of a new one.
It follows several characters through different periods in their lives, from decades before the pandemic, to its early days, to 15 and 20 years after the event. Most of the main characters are creatives with different relationships to their art, and to Arthur Leander, a famous actor who dies onstage during a production of King Lear, on the day that the pandemic reaches North America. His death serves a focal point, and symbolically as the death of the old world that brings forth new life.
Life after the pandemic is difficult and dangerous, especially at the beginning. However, most of the focus is on a period 20 years after the event, when people have mostly settled …
Station Eleven is a novel about a pandemic of apocalyptic proportions, but, crucially, it is not about the end of the world so much as it is about the birth of a new one.
It follows several characters through different periods in their lives, from decades before the pandemic, to its early days, to 15 and 20 years after the event. Most of the main characters are creatives with different relationships to their art, and to Arthur Leander, a famous actor who dies onstage during a production of King Lear, on the day that the pandemic reaches North America. His death serves a focal point, and symbolically as the death of the old world that brings forth new life.
Life after the pandemic is difficult and dangerous, especially at the beginning. However, most of the focus is on a period 20 years after the event, when people have mostly settled down into relatively stable settlements. It follows the Travelling Symphony, a group of actors and musicians who travel the Great Lakes region of North America performing Shakespeare and classical music, and a man who builds a museum of artifacts from the fallen civilisation. It's not about an animalistic, Hobbesian struggle for survival, but the preservation of culture and memory, and communicating what we are into the future, because, as the (borrowed) slogan of the Travelling Symphony puts it, "survival is insufficient".
It's about memory and trauma, loss, isolation and hope, it's in turn haunting and terrifying, but above all, beautiful. Loved it.