Book Review | Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel

Station Eleven book by A great Writter Emily St John Mandel

This is the interview of Emily St John Mandel recorded about 5 years back for her book Station Eleven

Read About Emily St John Mandel Here

Summary of Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel

Now a days the name Emily St John Mandel is coming through many articles. There is a reason why her name is getting popular among the readers. She came up with Station Eleven almost 6 years ago. Station Eleven was published in September 2014. 

Emily St John Mandel published her latest novel The Glass Hotel this year. You can read review of The Glass Hotel here.
Station Eleven is the fourth novel by Emily St John Mandel. The book was also short listed in National book Awards for Fiction. The plot of this book is about a pandemic situation. A flue that is going to spread and will create a pandemic situation in the world. This flue will wipe out the majority of population.
How this pandemic situation will affect the world is what Emily tries to tell in this book. She tried to tell her readers how you can find peace and happiness even in tough situations like Pandemic flue. 

Overview of Station Eleven

At the very beginning of the book Station Eleven, there is a stage play of king lear. But the tragic things happens during the performance. A celebrity collapses during the performance and dies. And this is the start of the Pandemic. The flue takes its first soul. 

This becomes the outbreak of a super flue that begins from Toranto and explodes like a nuclear weapon. This is very shocking when readers will come to know that 99% of population affected because of this deadliest flue.

The book Station Eleven speaks about the out break of flue and then how world is reshaping after few years of this outbreak. Arthur becomes the famous character and at the other hand Kristin's post apocalyptic life is the main narrative of the Station Eleven. 

We can see that this pandemic situation affected the life of Kristin even she is in adulthood now. Here Emily smartly covered the story of Kristin. She is still part of a travelling symphony and she still has the memories of Arthur (the actor one who died at the beginning during the play) in the old paper cuttings and in her mind though. 

Apart from Kristin's friends other peoples are related to Arthur's life. The people's who survived through this pandemic have their own past is the mystery which station eleven explores. Readers will surprised after reading about future situation after pandemic. How pandemic  will affect the future civilization. Emily explained about the behaviour of people after pandemic. 

Station eleven is not just about pandemic, flue, deaths but it also has a bright side. It also shows thoughtful perspective view to a fallen world. 

Station eleven  states that the pandemic situation might cripple the world but would not destroy it totally. The heart of people still have that kindness, love even after going through the tough times. 

The bond between people will get more strong after the pandemic happens. 

Back cover of Station Eleven

Weakness of Station Eleven

• I think Emily focused on negative things more than the positive ones, which I think is not a good thing.
• This book is totally based on imagination, you can never predict the situation after pandemic, unless you faced one.

Strengths of Station Eleven

• Station eleven best describes the pandemic situation
• The way she used the phrases from star trek movie and other Shakespeare quotes.
• I salute to the imagination of Emily st John Mandel
• I found this book very relatable with today's situation.

Best Quotes from Station Eleven

• Hell is the absence of the people you long for.
• No one ever thinks they’re awful, even people who really actually are. It’s some sort of survival mechanism

• The thing with the new world, the tuba had said once, is it’s just horrifically short on elegance
• No more Internet. No more social media, no more scrolling through litanies of dreams and nervous hopes and photographs of lunches, cries for help and expressions of contentment and relationship-status updates with heart icons whole or broken, plans to meet up later, pleas, complaints, desires, pictures of babies dressed as bears or peppers for Halloween. No more reading and commenting on the lives of others, and in so doing, feeling slightly less alone in the room. No more avatars

• The beauty of this world where almost everyone was gone. If hell is other people, what is a world with almost no people in it?

• He found he was a man who repented almost everything, regrets crowding in around him like moths to a light. This was actually the main difference between twenty-one and fifty-one, he decided, the sheer volume of regret

• She is beautiful in a way that makes people forget what they were going to say when they look at her

• She was thinking about the way she’d always taken for granted that the world had certain people in it, either central to her days or unseen and infrequently thought of. How without any one of these people the world is a subtly but unmistakably altered place, the dial turned just one or two degrees

• We traveled so far and your friendship meant everything. It was very difficult, but there were moments of beauty. Everything ends. I am not afraid

• This is my soul and the world unwinding, this is my heart in the still winter air. Finally whispering the same two words over and over: Keep walking. Keep walking. Keep walking

These are few quotes from Station Eleven

Short Overview of Station Eleven

Emily St John Mandel described the effect of a pandemic situation very well. She imagined the situation and stated the effects in every characters life. The station Eleven's narrative revolves around Arthur and Christine.

The book also talks about afterlife of pandemic. How civilization will change after few years and how people will survive. 

Overall I found this book very relatable. You should give this book a try.

Leave your feedback in comments and share this post if you liked😊